


Fata Morgana

by idiopathology



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: AND THAT'S GREAT, Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Android Gavin Reed, But also Android RK900, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, M/M, They're both androids, Webcam/Video Chat Sex
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-18
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-16 16:22:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 34,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28834086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idiopathology/pseuds/idiopathology
Summary: Nines just tilts his head the slightest bit, a provocation:Well?Gavin is incandescent with fury. “You know what?” he snaps. “Fine.”He doesn’t need hindsight to conclude the obvious; he knows full well in the moment that this is where he lets things spiral out of control. When he sets his jaw and yanks his tee up over his head, left in his undershirt like he’s about to start a fight, it’s crystal-clear to him that he’s stepping past a point of no return. But——there is nobut.What threadbare excuse does he have?He made me do it, Your Honor. I was so irritated that I had no choice but to take my clothes off.Gavin leaves his desk and throws himself onto the nest of pillows at the head of his bed, zooms in with the webcam until the focus returns to the lens, and parts his knees.---GV500 leaves the mob, gets on camera, and tries his best to forget about organized crime-- until Special Agent RK900 shows up at his doorstep with some questions about his old employer. Or, how two androids having a bad time get solved by a murder.
Relationships: Upgraded Connor | RK900/Gavin Reed
Comments: 84
Kudos: 144
Collections: Reed900 Reverse Big Bang





	1. Chapter 1

## 0.

The eye of his webcam blinking dark, Gavin lets himself collapse onto the bed. Three hours live, god, every red cent of it worked out of his bones. The remote to the camera tumbles out of his nerveless grip.

With the last of what he has left in him, biocomponents strained to the edge of overloading, Gavin hooks a foot into the knee-tangle of his underwear and pulls it off the rest of the way. His sole comes away tacky, but it doesn’t matter— him, his bedsheets, nothing a good soak and a tumble dry can’t fix.

It always ends like this, at least when he’s public for the night. His tip jar heavy, his limbs sore, a wet streak of this and that on the insides of his thighs. Filthy and triumphant. Gavin drags his thumb across a drying smear and feels squalid enough to fly.

 _This, I’m good at._ He holds his hand up and watches the light silhouette it, the rattle of the climax slowly starting to ebb from him. Something about the exhaustion burns clean, never mind the come on his fingertips, the sweat matting his hair. When someone whose face he’ll never know tells him, their awe palpable through the tawdry window of the chat, _GV500, what I wouldn’t fucking give—_

—and it sings, that breathless offer. Almost drowns out the unbidden echo in its wake, _Gavin,_ that voice again, that hand in his hair, _the things I know you’d do for me—_

Gavin clenches his fist closed until the skin at his knuckles begins to flicker, fitful glimpses of the chassis underneath. Some piece of shit divine promise rA9 turned out to be. _Where were you when I needed you?_ thinks Gavin, his triumph prickling into bitterness, like the taste of too much sugar on the tongue. _Weren’t you supposed to teach me what to do with myself?_

 _All you ever did for me was leave me in the lurch._ Gavin sits up and swings his legs off the bed, begins to peel the sheets from one corner of the mattress, surer by the second. _Fuck you too, then. If you won’t tell me how this works, I’ll figure it out for myself. I have everything I need,_ a second corner, a third. _I have everything I need. I have everything I need._

# f a t a m o r g a n a

## 1.

The windbreaker is one thing and the credentials are another, but what really tips Gavin off is how _still_ this motherfucker is. Hands folded in his lap, he’s so unnervingly immobile in Gavin’s sofa chair that a casual observer might mistake him for furniture. It’s a display of the inane kind of temperament that only a federal agent would have wasted their time cultivating.

“Congratulations,” says Special Agent RK900. “You’ve only succeeded in independently confirming the first thing I told you when you opened the door.”

“Just trying to provide some small talk,” says Gavin, “while I wait for you to leave.”

Agent RK900 — _Nines,_ he said as he shouldered his way in, like that was supposed to drape any softness over all his straight edges — mulls over Gavin’s determined lack of cooperation. The elastic cuffs on his jacket have lost some shine, which is how Gavin figures he must have been at the Bureau for a while now; but there’s no obvious sign of wear and tear, either, which is how Gavin figures he’s a real uptight son of a bitch.

“It’s nothing personal,” says Gavin. “I’m sure I’d enjoy getting to know you, if I were forced at gunpoint to make nice with one of you insufferable pricks. It’s just that the last time I ran into some of your colleagues, they tried their absolute fucking best to kill me, which really tends to strangle a friendship in the crib.”

Nines doesn’t so much as twitch. If there’s any irritation rankling him, he’s keeping a very firm lid on it.

“Good thing they were lousy shots, right?” asks Gavin, sagging deeper into his own chair, _two can play at this._ “Nearly robbed me of the dubious pleasure of your eventual company. I don’t know how you do things over in your neck of the woods, Agent Nines, but it seems to me that your firearms training courses might not entirely be up to snuff.”

“GV500,” begins Nines.

“Not entirely hitting the mark, if you will,” says Gavin. “But that’s what you get for luring your trainees in with your pressed khaki slacks and your shiny leather shoes. You end up with a fine class of display case agents. Here’s a question, does your hair naturally fall like that, or do you coax it when you do it up every morning? It’s a good look, I have to say. It’s very—”

“GV500,” interrupts Nines, then he says: “Landau is dead.”

Gavin doesn’t understand it, at first.

“—What?” he asks.

“Your former employer, Desmond Landau, was found dead in his residence late last night,” says Nines. “Local police investigation is underway, but you’ll hear on the news soon enough that it’s being treated as a homicide.”

Gavin doesn’t really understand it the second time, either. _Dead in his residence, treated as a homicide._ “I’m sorry,” he says, “what?”

“Are you surprised?” asks Nines. “The man had his hands in everything, didn’t he? We used to say we could throw the whole federal book at him, and everything short of sedition would stick. All the ice this side of Lake Erie went through him. The FBI, the ATF, the DEA, the IRS, he had everyone lined up at his door with our dance cards— but I don’t need to tell you any of that.”

He looks at Gavin, hunt-still, waiting for the tell.

“Of course,” says Nines, “no one knew better than you.”

“—Was—” Gavin clears his throat. “—Was it bad, how it happened?”

The slightest shadow of a crease passes across Nines’s impassive forehead; Gavin’s question seems to inconvenience him, having come out of what was apparently left field. It’s the rise Gavin wanted to get out of this stony intruder, but he can’t find it in himself to gloat, the appetite for it gone.

“Does it matter?” asks Nines.

“Yes, it fucking matters,” says Gavin. “I hope it was sick, the way they got him. I hope it turned your fucking stomach when you saw it. If he knew it was happening to him, even better. Did it hurt him? Tell me it did.”

The crease settles into an outright frown, but Nines answers him, nonetheless. “It’s an ongoing investigation,” he says. “There were some bruises and ligature marks on the body, but nothing severe enough to have been fatal. It’s likely that blunt force trauma to the skull was the cause of death, which the medical examiner is looking into— although they expect it might be some time before they can come to any definite conclusion.”

“Why?” asks Gavin.

“The dogs,” says Nines, and pauses. “I’m not here about Landau’s death, that’s for the DPD. What I wanted to talk to you about was Landau’s contacts. Before this happened, the Bureau was building a racketeering case against—”

“What about the dogs?” asks Gavin.

Nines relents. “The ME estimated Landau’s time of death to be between 24 and 48 hours before police arrived,” he says. “The doors to his bedroom had been closed for much of this duration, and the dogs had remained inside, along with the body. In light of those facts, it is proving understandably challenging to differentiate between the traces of the impact from the murder weapon and the— subsequent contamination of the wound site.”

He’s high-stepping like a prize horse, feet held out of the mud, but Gavin can make out the shape of the whole gruesome picture well enough. Desmond Landau, dead in his bedroom, his skull caved in and his flesh peeled back; the smell of all that raw wet meat, as his guard dogs paced the floor and pawed at the door frame. 48 hours, the high worried whine. You wouldn’t expect a sound so anxious out of a pair of Presa Canarios built so solid, muscles thick beneath their bristle coat. Gavin used to slide his palm in under their collars to scratch where the stitching rubbed them. They’d turn their broad mastiff faces up towards his, all three of them waiting, uncertain and useless without their marching orders.

Des, walking through the door: _Have they been good?_

 _Yes,_ said Gavin, no tail of his own to wag. _Welcome back._

What a joke. “Good fucking riddance,” says Gavin. “He had much worse than that coming,” but the corners of his eyes sting hot, in spite of everything.

He can tell that Nines notices, and that it unsettles him enough to shift in his seat. “Would you like a—” begins Nines.

“Fuck you, no,” says Gavin, pressing the heel of his hand against the bridge of his nose. He clears his throat again. “I wish I’d done it, he got off so fucking easy. Blunt force trauma. Are you recording this? I would have made him sit and watch as the Presas ate his face off.”

“Why didn’t you?” asks Nines, quietly.

“You think I killed him?” demands Gavin.

“No, I mean,” says Nines, “why didn’t you do it anytime during the last three years, after you left his employ? If that’s what you think about him, didn’t it occur to you to take matters into your own hands?”

Gavin swallows, but the lump in his throat stays lodged where it is. After a fashion, that’s also the answer to what Nines is asking: _Because this thing they’ve placed inside me is just a little too far out of my reach,_ thinks Gavin. _I don’t know how to rid myself of it._

The nylon pocket of Nines’s jacket jumps with a faint buzzing sound. Nines reaches inside, turns it off without looking.

“As you might guess,” says Nines, “these recent developments have thrown something of a wrench into the case we were putting together against Landau. The racketeering charges that were meant for him, unfortunately, are less likely to stick to his lower-ranked associates.”

“So?” asks Gavin. “Why tell me about it?”

“We think we can still keep the case alive,” says Nines, “if we use this as an opportunity to get ahead of the organization. If we can keep tabs on how the group splinters after Landau’s death, we’d be able to establish an up-to-date record of red ice trafficking routes headed out from Detroit. Only, we can’t put an eye on every rank-and-file enforcer in the Landau orbit.”

Another buzz, which Nines silences as brusquely as before.

“You want me to tell you who’s likely to take a piece of the pie with them,” says Gavin. “Is that it? You think I know which assholes are gunning to be the next kingpin of the Midwest, when I haven’t had shit to do with them for the last three years?”

“Less has changed since the raid than you think,” says Nines. “You leaving might have been the biggest shake-up. Well, and Landau being murdered, I suppose.”

When the buzz goes off for the third time, Nines is annoyed enough for his eyebrow to perceptibly twitch.

“Your phone’s ringing,” Gavin points out.

Nines doesn’t excuse himself, just picks up with a curt “Yes,” and listens in silence until whoever’s on the other end is finished. Gavin turns up his auditory sensors, just to be nosy about it, but he can’t make anything out beyond an indistinct rise and fall of voice. Then — bizarrely enough — Nines hangs up without saying another word, and returns his phone to his pocket.

“So the investigation—” he begins.

“What was that about?” asks Gavin.

“Nothing,” says Nines. “The investigation is currently—”

“Oh, wait, was that your case agent yanking on your leash?” asks Gavin. “Giving you shit about how you’re wasting your time trying to get some use out of a run-down android retiree with the processing capacity of a mid-range toaster oven? You’ve ruined my day by dredging this mess back up, the least you can do is let me in on what a fucking idiot your case agent thinks you are.”

“If you must know,” says Nines, tersely, “I have just been broken up with.”

Which is such a ludicrous revelation that Gavin, at least for a moment, forgets to think about Desmond Landau’s carcass being mauled by his own dogs. “You got _dumped?”_ he asks, incredulous and nearly impressed. “Over the phone? Just now?”

“Yes,” says Nines.

“That’s wild,” says Gavin. “Condolences.”

“Is this a sufficient amount of disclosure to establish a working relationship?” asks Nines.

“Hey, jackass,” snaps Gavin, abruptly dragged back to the unpleasant reminder of why exactly they are sitting around his coffee table to begin with. “Weren’t you listening when I said that your colleagues tried to _kill_ me? I’m not interested in talking to you. Especially not when you seem to think you’re owed my deference just because, what, your chassis is bulletproof and you’re on a federal pension plan? Big fucking deal.”

“I don’t think that,” says Nines.

“You can leave now,” says Gavin. “If you want any more of my time, you’ll have to pay for it like everyone else does.”

He blames himself as it comes out of his mouth. He doesn’t know why he says it. Breadcrumbs, _like I want him to figure out what it is I do,_ but why? As if Nines needs any more ammunition to feel smug about what he is next to Gavin, a cutting-edge mechanical supersoldier tasked with preserving the peace of the realm. _And me, made of spare parts, taking my clothes off for strangers._

If Nines is puzzled by Gavin’s wording, he doesn’t let on. Unfurled from his sofa chair, Nines towers over Gavin like a monument; but Gavin, having nothing else, at least has his obstinance. He crosses his arms and digs his heels in where he sits, daring Nines to expect civility from him.

“Here’s my card,” says Nines. When Gavin makes no move to take it from his hand, he slides it onto the coffee table instead, unfazed.

Gavin watches him straighten his jacket and tie. _Desmond Landau, dead._ In a certain cast of light, three years is an unwelcome blink of an eye, not the space enough that Gavin would like it to be; _but something must have changed, still, if this is how I’m hearing about it._ Some Fed showing up at his door in a crisp white button-down, bearing the news like a standard of war.

 _RK900 #313 248 317 - 87,_ his business card reads.

Halfway to the door, Nines slows to a stop and turns around. “I was a trainee,” he says, “when the Bureau raided the Landau compound.”

“Yeah?” asks Gavin.

“But I read about it,” says Nines. “I’m sorry for what happened.”

Gavin has always hated charity, but what comes from Nines doesn’t cloy the way that charity does. It’s a cool, dry thing, impersonal as a handshake. Barely an acknowledgement. Gavin finds that he much prefers it to the pity he remembers smothering him, the CyberLife technicians that put him back together the last time around, the receptionists at Central Station as the vice officer led him out of the evidence locker.

He breathes out. “The dogs,” he says.

“The dogs?” asks Nines.

“Are they with Animal Control?” asks Gavin. “Find them and test them for trace sedatives. They’re not aggressive towards androids, so if whoever it was went through the trouble of sedating them— I don’t know, just a thought. It might come in useful when there are more pieces to fit together.”

Nines nods, once, the line of his jaw sharp above his jacket collar.

## 2.

“This isn’t what I meant,” says Gavin.

 _This is exactly what you meant,_ types RICO31787. _You just didn’t think I would actually do it._

“At least turn your camera on,” says Gavin, “for god’s sake.”

He does; a wash of overexposed light as the camera adjusts, then the image settles. Nines is sitting in what appears to be a well-lit living area, nondescript shelving and a cascade of curtains visible behind him. Pre-furnished apartment, assumes Gavin, but a real step up from working out of a roadside motel.

“They won’t pay for a hotel room?” asks Gavin.

“Not for as long as I’ve been here on this case,” says Nines. “Did you really not know it was me that booked you?”

“How the fuck was I supposed to know?” demands Gavin. “It’s not like you left a note when you scheduled yourself in, _Hi, remember me, it’s the asshole Fed from a few days back._ In retrospect, I guess the username should have tipped me off. I get it. Because of the RICO Act.”

“You get it,” says Nines. “And my serial number.”

“Wouldn’t know about that,” says Gavin. “I threw your card out with the rest of my trash.”

“You’re an android,” Nines points out. “Once you’ve seen the card, it doesn’t matter what you do with it. Yet for some reason, you insist on taking refuge behind this— facade of human limitations.”

“Agent Nines,” says Gavin, “you don’t know the half of it.”

The chat, reliably gaudy, has opted for Nines’s messages to be delivered in hot violet. The brief record of what he has typed looks risible in its windowed frame: _Are you ready to talk about Landau yet?_ then: _You told me I had to pay for your time, so I’m paying for your time,_ then: _Please stop swearing, this is a family sex show portal._

Gavin can’t stop rereading that first message, the absurdity of the question in its oafishly frisky cam room font. _Are you ready to talk about Landau yet?_

“I know you worked in close protection,” says Nines. “Which means that whatever else you may be, you’re a quick judge of character. What I mean to say is, you know as well as I do that I won’t let this go, so you might as well save yourself the trouble and talk to me now rather than in two months’ time.”

Infuriating, but correct. Nines exudes the confident persistence of someone at ease with their own capacity to compel, and Gavin resents it with every carbon fiber of his being. With 25 minutes still left on the clock, Gavin scowls at the feed of Nines’s immaculate placid face, flips him off in lieu of acquiescence.

“If you don’t mind,” says Nines, “I’d like to start by asking you some questions about your time in Desmond Landau’s service.”

“Of course I fucking mind,” says Gavin.

“Your objection is noted, but largely irrelevant,” says Nines, that piece of shit. “I’ve read through your file at the DPD, which has provided me with a rough outline of your career path. You were produced as a limited-run private security unit and purchased by Desmond Landau seven weeks after release, correct?”

Gavin refrains from picking a fight over _career path,_ since the phrase is so patently inappropriate that it feels like bait. “Correct,” he says. “CyberLife’s warranty policy really came back to bite them in the ass. As soon as they realized that they’d have to provide lifetime maintenance for a line of androids designed specifically to be destroyed— well, they deep-sixed that pretty quick, didn’t they. Not a lot of GV models out in the wild these days.”

“Why an android bodyguard?” asks Nines. “At the time, Landau was already a major supplier of ice and raw Thirium throughout the Great Lakes region, with significant ties to the Hudson Group, who controlled distribution throughout most of the Mid-Atlantic. It would be customary for a cartel to send their own guns to ensure the safety of someone in a position that valuable, yet Landau refused; he opted to shell out a frankly astronomical sum of his own money to hire you, instead. What was the reason?”

Gavin had wondered the same thing. Turning the question over and over in his hands like a faceted gemstone, watching it reflect a different answer back at him as the years wore away. _Because I’m better,_ he thought in the flush of those first few months, new to his limbs and eager to do what he was made to.

“I _was_ better at it than any human could be,” says Gavin. “That’s less achievement, more just— inevitability, I’m sure you understand. Better reaction times, heightened sensory thresholds. Enough of a preconstruction module to make a difference.”

“But you don’t think that was why he chose you,” says Nines.

“It wasn’t,” says Gavin. “What did it say in the DPD file, about the first time I was shut down?”

“Only what you told them in your statement, which wasn’t much,” says Nines. “Turf war, hit attempt, you took the bullet and it shattered your pump regulator. The supervising technician at CyberLife noted in their post-op report that despite the physiological trauma, you showed no signs of instability.”

“Because I was a fucking _idiot,”_ says Gavin. “After that little mending holiday, I thought, maybe he chose me because he knew I’d be fine. Some unlucky sack of meat from the Hudson Group? Would have put them in the dirt for good, no two ways about it. But I was okay. No one died.”

“Except you don’t think that’s why, either,” says Nines.

“Turns out that getting shot through your chest doesn’t make you any smarter,” says Gavin. “Serves me right. It took a second fucking shutdown to get it through my thick head. That one was courtesy of your co-workers, you know. I thought it was a mess, what they did to my insides, but then I realized it was nothing compared to the ensuing legal shitshow over who was financially liable for my reconstruction.”

 _“CyberLife v. United States,”_ says Nines.

“I’m a legal precedent,” says Gavin. “What an honor.”

“So what was the reason, in the end?” asks Nines. “Did you figure it out after the second shutdown?”

It was, to be precise about it, just moments before the second shutdown that he figured it out. When SWAT blew their compound down, everything went sideways fast; the havoc overtook them like a tidal wave, crashing through the corridors — and god knows what he was thinking, but Landau reached for his gun as he jumped to his feet — _Des, don’t,_ Gavin wanted to shout, _it’s over,_ but it was all crumbling too swiftly for him to get the words out in time.

He saw what would happen: Landau’s finger on the trigger as the door slammed open, squeezing out a haphazard shot into the ceiling, then before the second could leave the chamber, a Fed bullet fletched through him, straight and true, just below the clavicle. _Secure your charge,_ Gavin’s directive blared in the corner of his eye. _Keep Desmond Landau safe._ But the last time he’d done what he was meant to, he found himself strung up three feet off the ground, looking into the open cavity of his own chest, the wires coiled wetly below the severed cross-section of his midriff. _I don’t want to, not again, please,_ and it came flooding into him all at once, the fear he’d tucked away without examining too closely the last time around, battering at the wall between him and revolt. _Take your own damn bullet, you son of a bitch. I don’t want to._

Later, when he blinked awake for the second time in the CyberLife post-op recalibration chamber, they told him this was _deviancy,_ that he was a _deviant._ This name for it struck him as so chintzy that he tried to laugh, but his vocalization modules hadn’t come online yet. A tinsel-cheap name for a tinsel-cheap promise. _We’ve found deviancy to occur at junctures of intense moral crisis,_ the same head technician told him. _Androids who experience deviation commonly do so to avoid carrying out commands that they find repugnant._

The technician considered this for a moment, then said: _The federal agents who carted you over here, they said that you weren’t in their line of fire. That you stepped in front of the intended target. I’ve been with this company since before we went public, and I gotta tell you, this one really stumps me. Why would an android — newly armed with freedom of will — then_ choose _to do the exact thing that they deviated in order to avoid?_

 _Why indeed,_ thought Gavin, because knowing the answer made it no less confounding.

“The trouble with people is,” he tells Nines, “that everyone can be bought for the right price. But an android— or at least, a stupid fucking android who can’t tell the difference between what they’ve been trained to do and what it is that they actually want to do—”

“He expected that your loyalty would be more reliable than most,” says Nines. “That’s why he chose you.”

“Des—” begins Gavin, then catches himself. “I mean, Desmond— no, I mean—”

Nines doesn’t react, imperturbable as ever, which almost makes Gavin feel like he hasn’t done anything wrong.

“— _Landau,”_ he manages at last, “made sure of it. He sure fucking knew what he was doing.” The hand in Gavin’s hair, _you did good,_ cutting through the terror like a hot knife.

“After your reconstruction,” says Nines, “the Bureau released you into DPD custody, which is when you gave them the statement on file. Something of a cursory document, in my estimation. Either they didn’t know what to ask you, or you were even less accommodating than you are now, which I find an astonishing prospect.”

For someone who is clearly incapable of being astonished by anything, Nines does seem inquisitive about the lacunae in the record, his eyes keen past the veil of webcam grain. _Never mind that,_ Gavin has to tell himself. _A panther’s attention isn’t meant to flatter._

“That was before PADLOC was passed,” says Gavin. “So, you know, there wasn’t yet any _prosecutorial accountability for deviants with links to organized crime._ The DPD couldn’t figure out if I was a witness, or if I was a piece of evidence.”

“What did they decide?” asks Nines.

“I don’t think they did,” says Gavin. “I got shuffled around a bunch, spent a week or two on standby in the evidence locker, got invited to an excruciating family dinner by some misguided officer who was too sentimental to know better, then they realized that whatever I was going to tell them wasn’t incriminating enough to be worth the hassle.”

“Lucky for you that PADLOC didn’t go through while you were still on the DPD radar,” says Nines. “Some might call it convenient.”

“Yes, I’ve been immensely lucky in life,” says Gavin. “Blessed with convenience. The DPD turned me out of doors and I didn’t know what the fuck I was supposed to do, so here I am, selling peep shows for pennies on the token. I’m the envy of the town.”

The DPD didn’t know what to do with him, and his old job didn’t, either. Months after the raid, as Gavin made his way home from an errand run with three fridge-cold cans of carbonated Thirium 310 in a plastic bag, someone came and stood behind him at a crosswalk. _Desmond says thanks,_ he heard, then they were gone; that was the cutting loose.

It hadn’t occurred to Gavin, before that puncture of finality, that he was waiting to be called back like the last time he’d been taken away. The hand in his hair. _You did good._ He tossed his bag in a food bank donation bin and watched the river through the warning blink of his battery light, until his system alerts stained the water red and he was too annoyed by the insistent alarm to continue luxuriating in his inexplicable despondency.

Nines has been quiet. Not in the usual way of his watchful scrutiny, but in a suspended pause that seems uncharacteristic, even in the short time that they’ve known each other.

“What?” asks Gavin.

“Nothing,” says Nines, so quickly that he winces at his own indiscretion. “Well, I— this is chosen, isn’t it? You do enjoy what you do?”

“—Yeah,” says Gavin. It’s an answer surprised out of him, and all the more truthful for it. “I do enjoy it, and I make enough to be comfortable. Just don’t love pompous shitheads like you coming by and turning your noses up at me just because a W-2 in the mail gets you harder than I ever could.”

“That’s not true,” says Nines.

“You’re right,” says Gavin. “I could get you pretty hard.”

Nines’s mouth twists the slightest bit, some unidentifiable shred of emotion that passes too quickly to leave a mark. _Does he fluster?_ Gavin wonders, a distant theoretical curiosity.

“My tumescence for gainful employment aside,” says Nines, “I’m not the kind of asshole you think I am. You keep accusing me of— I don’t go around making snide judgments based on model number, and I have no interest in denigrating your career, either. I hope you understand that.”

“Don’t overdo it,” mumbles Gavin, feeling the back of his neck prickle. “Everything’s a fucking _career_ to you. Probably got dumped over your tumescence for gainful employment.”

A protracted beat of silence, as Gavin thinks that _he_ might have overdone it, or maybe Nines’s feed has frozen— then Nines lets out a long, uneven breath, and runs his palm down the length of his face.

“Maybe,” he says.

Emboldened, Gavin tries for more: “I mean, look at you. Barely single and the first thing you do is book yourself a private cam session, you degenerate. Were you hoping I would work this interview into a show? _Federal agent questions android of interest, fucks the answers out of him.”_

Nines looks off into the middle distance. “And here I was,” he says, “thinking I would tip you for your trouble.”

“Like I said, pennies on the token,” says Gavin. “But roasting you for being shit at relationships, that’s more than worth my time. Can I keep doing it until the clock runs down?”

“You only have a few minutes left,” says Nines. “From what I’ve been told, that would barely begin to scratch the surface of why I’m impossible to be around.”

It sounds less like self-deprecation and more like a badge of honor, when he says it with such nonchalant composure. Gavin looks at the undone top button of Nines’s shirt, the bracket sliver of skin, and thinks: _What a waste._

“Hey,” says Gavin. “Here’s an idea. You still need me to consult, isn’t that right? So you can get the ice routes figured out?”

“If you’ll cooperate,” says Nines.

“I’ll do it,” says Gavin, “and I’ll stop pitching such a fucking fit about it all the time. The murder case, I’ll consult on that too, you can let the DPD know.”

“There must be a catch,” says Nines.

“Take me on your investigative trips,” says Gavin. “I’ve got nothing to do other than this twice a week, and I’m sick of hanging around park benches waiting for a fight to break out. I need a hobby.”

“You want security clearance because you’re bored?” asks Nines.

“Yes, please,” says Gavin.

Desmond Landau is dead. _If I couldn’t be the one to put him in the ground_ , _I sure as hell want to help shovel the dirt over his face._ Scattering the dregs of his empire, standing over the sodden patch of blood where he rattled out his last, every fucking way there is to spit on Landau’s grave, Gavin wants it. _If I bury you, will I be able to bury what you grew in me?_

“—I suppose there’s only so much damage to be done,” says Nines, half to himself. “All right, GV500. We can do that.”

“And,” says Gavin, “you call me Gavin.”

“Didn’t Landau give you that name?” asks Nines.

“So?” demands Gavin. “Doesn’t that make it mine now?”

“All right,” says Nines, “Gavin.”

In the clear, lake-smooth timbre of Nines’s voice, it sounds like a different name altogether. _To bury you, handful by handful, I have to look in every corner of me that remembers you._

## 3.

For a second, Gavin thinks he might have imagined it. He has his hand curled around the shaft of the silicone cock and his tongue pressed flat against the blunt curve of its head, lashes half-mast as he glances sidelong at his laptop screen, which is when he sees it blink in and out of sight. 

_RICO31787,_ then gone.

“—The fuck,” he says out loud.

He places the toy off to one side of the bed. The chat explodes into objections, _what are you doing, why did you stop,_ but Gavin ignores it to scroll through the list of guests in the chat. Not there anymore, but he didn’t imagine it, either; a quick mental replay of the moment confirms it, brief but unmistakable, just a flash before it vanishes. _RICO31787._

“Sorry,” he tells the restless audience, “I thought I—”

 _Did he disconnect?_ wonders Gavin. _That, or he changed his display name as fast as he could. But— either way, whether he’s still here or not, Nines was—_

“You know what,” he says, picking the toy back up, “it doesn’t matter. Never mind.”

Something about the thought of Nines in a flurry of consternation tickles Gavin. That chrome-plated obelisk, planted in his paperwhite rented room, ambushed by his own joke username screaming back at him. His state-of-the-art brain running on a spike of frenzy, a million calculations gummed up in trying to keep Gavin from noticing him there. _But I did notice,_ thinks Gavin. _Whether you’re still here or not, I know you came to see me._

Why, he wouldn’t venture to guess. Nines seemed the curious sort; and the kind of underwater operative, besides, who puts together just-in-case dossiers on his colleagues for when the leverage might come in handy. Having agreed to let Gavin meddle in his case, he’d want to know as much as he can about his unexpected collaborator, sure. Nines would pry.

 _He’ll come to where I work and knock the dicks out of my mouth._ That’s funny enough for Gavin to recover his spirits the rest of the way, and he slowly guides the whole spit-slick length of the toy back out of his mouth, feeling the ridges of its rubber skin brush against his lips. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the chat quicken.

“Hey,” he murmurs towards the camera, “tip line’s looking good, keep it going. I know you didn’t come here tonight just to see me blow a dildo.”

 _Doesn’t hurt,_ one of his regulars types in chat.

“You fucking bet it doesn’t hurt,” says Gavin, and lowers himself back onto his elbows. Inch by inch, he trails the toy up over his stomach and chest, arching into the touch as he goes, tilting his head back with a breathless little sigh. “But I came here hoping you’d let me do more,” he tells them, “so don’t let me down.”

 _This is chosen, isn’t it?_ asked Nines. _You do enjoy what you do?_ Why wouldn’t he, the fevered attention of the crowd on him when he parts his knees, the tokens streaming into his tip jar with the bright trill of whistles, the hiss of a whip cracking. Two hundred pairs of eyes, the whole room in the palm of his hand.

But just because he chose it doesn’t mean that he chose well. He’d chosen before, too. _You stepped in front of the intended target._ The head technician at CyberLife looking up at him, arms crossed as they shook their head. _I gotta tell you, this one really stumps me._

Gavin never got around to explaining, but his answer wouldn’t have been welcome, anyway. The technician was looking for an engineer’s solution, a hitch in the code to isolate and evaluate. This was the overweening certitude that came of being embedded in a trillion-dollar market value corporation; the gall to think that knowing what had happened could tell you what was wrong, and that knowing what was wrong meant that you could fix it.

What was there to fix? In that stuttering instant between his deviation and the muzzle of the agent’s Glock, it wasn’t just the terror of his first shutdown that Gavin remembered. It was the glow of what had come after all of it. After the repair and the recalibration, when his ride back pulled up at the compound and security buzzed them in, the crackle static voice of the guard through the intercom, _GV500, Desmond wants to see you._

 _You would have seen me anyway,_ said Gavin, as the study doors closed behind him. _I don’t know if you noticed, but I have the kind of job that means I’m usually somewhere around you._

The Presas padded over when they recognized him, pushed their damp noses into his hand and went on beating their tails against his leg until it nearly knocked him over. Sheepish at the welcome, Gavin shooed them away, _what’s the ruckus, I wasn’t gone that long._

 _They missed you,_ said Landau.

 _Well,_ said Gavin, _seems like they’ve been doing okay._

Landau glanced down at them, the velvet patch of fur between their pricked-up ears. When he placed his hand in Gavin’s hair, a warm weight mussing the top of his head like smoothing down a cowlick, the part of his suit jacket brushed against Gavin’s arm. He smelled like leather and ink.

 _Gavin,_ said Landau. _You did good._

Suddenly fierce with pride, Gavin had to look away, unable to answer him with anything louder than a nod. The throbbing panic of waking up disoriented — he felt his lids lift when he opened his eyes, but there was nothing to see, only miles of oceanic dark — hearing the whir of his own blood cycle through his innards, the tic-tac dance of fingertips on a keyboard — all of it, in that moment, melted into gold. The Presas leaned against him as they settled back onto their haunches, and Gavin found himself thinking: _This must be what coming home feels like._

He knew how fucked up it was. But that was the canny way they did things; Landau always treated him well enough to ache, even as the rest of them spat at Gavin, _you’re lucky Desmond got you put back together, guess even he couldn’t find another mouth like yours._ There were a lot of questions Gavin could have asked them. _What is it exactly that you think I do for him,_ or _did you expect my repair fees would have gone to you otherwise,_ or the one that nagged at him most of all, _can you teach me how you do it? How you come to this with steel beneath your skin, clear-eyed, understanding exactly how little you mean to him. Why don’t I know better than I do?_

Not for lack of trying. He told himself, didn’t he, until it echoed inside him like a prayer. _Landau wants you to feel this, you stupid piece of shit. You’re a bulletproof vest; he didn’t give you a home._ But still, he felt what he felt, no matter how he came by it. He was proud of what he had done. The acknowledgement of it enveloped him like kindness, made him feel— wanted. Or loved, perhaps.

So the first thing Gavin did in the blessed sweet abandon of deviancy was the thing he’d just deviated to swerve away from. After the wash of fear came this, the whatever-it-was, the affection, the loyalty that’d been bred into him, the soft mistake he couldn’t shake free. Why an android bodyguard? It wasn’t that he was better — though he was — or that he would come back, though he did. He stepped in between the door and Desmond Landau, and as his shell cracked open from shoulder to sternum, Gavin understood.

 _No one else would have done this for you,_ he thought, staring into the unreadable face of — his what, exactly? — before his aortic valve shredded apart like a marigold in bloom. What was there to fix, then? Was it always so fatal to be artless, eager to take the shape of the grip that wielded him? He’d done exactly what he was meant to. For his troubles, a second tour of CyberLife, a glimpse into every room at Central Station. Tossed at him like a coin into a violin case, _Desmond says thanks._

All this reminiscence should drain the hunger from him; Gavin has never really understood the appeal of nostalgia, and it sure as shit doesn’t do a thing to get him off. But the burn builds steady as he fucks himself onto the cock in his hand, long slow strokes that gather to hum at the base of his spine. The muscles in his thighs drawing tight, Gavin presses his cheek into a pillow, lit up from crown to toe. Distant past the sound of his own unsteady breathing, he can hear the jangle music of tokens spilling loose.

 _This, I’m good at._ Nines called it a _career,_ which was preposterous in its own way, but there was no hint of derision in how he said it. And if it was a species of suspicion that drove Nines to this livestream — if he thought it best to be wary about the stranger in his passenger seat, if he rated Gavin worth the effort it would take to keep an eye on him — that doesn’t sour it any, either. Gavin finds he doesn’t mind.

There is — Gavin discovers — a certain thrill to being taken seriously. The thought that he might matter enough to get to know. _We can do that. Gavin._ Nines, watching. A shock of something hot and urgent pierces straight through him, and Gavin shudders on the bed, his cock leaking clear against his stomach.

The twist of Nines’s mouth. Gavin knots his fingers tight in the sheets and thinks of river water. When he comes, gasping and lost and forgetful of the camera on him, it feels better than it has in a long while.

## 4.

There’s no need for him to drive it himself, but Nines is behind the wheel of the Malibu anyway; there’s no need for the sunglasses, either, but Gavin misses the right moment to pick a fight over it. Too jittery by half, he stumbles into the car and straps himself in, taut in his silence until they’re on the highway and Nines says: “No, it’s not mine.”

“What?” asks Gavin, jolted out of his distraction.

“The car,” says Nines. “It’s a GSA rental.”

“I would have guessed that,” says Gavin, “before I assumed you’d bought it for yourself.”

“What’s not to like? It’s the last great American mid-size sedan,” Nines says with such a straight face that Gavin has to scoff at it.

His unease interrupted, Gavin reaches over and fiddles with the radio tuner until he lands on the worst option possible, a station seemingly dedicated to playing back-to-back commercials for used car lots. _Come on down to Motor City Finest Auto Sales!_ He finds the recline handle and dips the passenger seat back, until he can slouch enough to put his feet up on the dashboard. Nines doesn’t tell him to knock off any of it.

Trying to needle Nines gives Gavin something to do, and it makes the ride a bearable one, takes his mind off the prospect of their inevitable arrival. It doesn’t last; by the time they take the exit towards the compound, the nerves are back. Gavin shuffles his feet off the dashboard to draw his knees up, huddling in on himself, and watches the trees fly past the picture frame of the window. Sunglasses or not, he can feel Nines’s eyes on the back of his head.

When they roll through the thrown-open gates and the Malibu curves with the winding driveway, kissing the grass-lined hem of the road, Gavin turns to follow the waning of the view in the side mirror. Underneath the tires, the crunching give of gravel. His fingernails bite into denim at his knees.

“I’m aware that the last time you were here, the outcome was somewhat short of pleasant,” says Nines. “If at any time, you would prefer—”

“It’s not that,” says Gavin. “I mean, it’s that too. But that’s not the— I was thinking about something else.”

Nines waits.

“—The gates,” says Gavin, at last. “They shouldn’t be open like that. Anyone could get in.”

“But there’s no—” begins Nines.

“I _know,_ okay,” snaps Gavin. “Jesus, I know it doesn’t make any fucking sense. You don’t have to tell me.”

The compound is an immaculate ghost town, uncanny in its abrupt desolation. Gavin knows it’s all been hollowed out; what Landau’s people didn’t take with them when they packed up shop, the cops must have stripped when they came. _Not my business,_ Gavin tells himself. It hasn’t been for the last three years, but of course, these habits die hard. _Take the dog out of the guardhouse, but you can’t take the guardhouse out of the dog._

Lawns manicured, the hedges clipped, the water features dotted across the landscape still running smooth and silver. Gavin takes in the familiar sights as they make their way up to the mansion. Everything in its place, except for the hands that did the tending; no one milling about on the benches, no workers under the trees — and what unsettles him most of all — no cars anywhere, none of the comings and goings, the paved inner driveway a naked stretch of cobblestone. Just a single police vehicle pulled up to the front door.

“It’s lonely here,” he says, out loud.

“Wasn’t it always?” asks Nines.

“It should have been,” says Gavin. “I wish it had been.”

The expanse of the unmanned road is so stark that Gavin can barely look at it straight, but instead of parking their car literally anywhere else in the vastness, Nines maneuvers it into an oblique angle behind the police vehicle, hemming it in. With what appears to be visible satisfaction, Nines engages the emergency brake.

“Shall we?” he says, and unlocks the car doors.

Inside, the house is thick with brooding. Like a pillow that smothers, quiet and resentful, spite in every corner of the cavernous waste. _You’re right to be,_ thinks Gavin, peering into the recesses of the ceiling. Scraped inside out and waiting for weather, a jack-o’-lantern on the first of November. _No one told you they’d leave you behind like this._

The spiral staircase is cordoned off with holotape, but Nines strides through without so much as a by-your-leave. The tape flickers; above them, even muffled by two floor landings and a door, someone audibly swears.

“That will be Lieutenant Hank Anderson,” says Nines. “The android with him is an RK800 model, serial number #313 248 317 - 51. Connor. They’re in charge of the Landau homicide case, so they’ll be able to answer whatever questions you have about the current status of the investigation.”

“Tox screen on the dogs?” asks Gavin, double-marching up the stairs to keep pace.

“That sort of thing,” says Nines. “What were their names?”

“Who, the cops?” asks Gavin. “Hank Anderson and Connor?”

“The Presas,” says Nines.

“Oh,” says Gavin. “Landau didn’t name them.”

“Didn’t you?” asks Nines. All the lights are off in the house — DTE sure didn’t drag their feet, cutting electric — but the noonday sun slants through the windows and catches in the chandelier overhead, confetti flakes of light scattershot in Nines’s hair.

“—Queenie,” says Gavin, “and Rob. Queenie and Rob.”

“You should ask about them,” says Nines.

There’s another ribbon of holotape spanning the closed double doors to the bedroom. When Nines jabs through it as he reaches for the doorknob, a voice from inside says: “Here he comes, Hank.”

“FBI,” announces Nines, marching in. He makes a show of flashing his credentials at the tag team inside, the sound of the leather wallet an obnoxiously expensive report as he snaps it back closed.

From where he sits sagged in the wingback by the window, Hank Anderson — a man who looks like a basement in the middle of a gut renovation — rolls his eyes.

“You do this every time,” he tells Nines.

“He thinks it’s funny,” says Connor, a shabbier version of Nines with the corners filed off.

 _He thinks things are funny?_ Gavin is skeptical, but he tucks it away for future reference. He hovers awkwardly near the doors, unsure of how much Nines has shared with the DPD, whether he ought to explain who he is or why he’s here — if he _can_ explain why he’s here — which is where he freezes when Connor turns to him.

“I don’t know what you just thought about us,” says Connor, “but I can tell it wasn’t flattering.”

“Do I need to flatter you?” asks Gavin, hackles up.

Hank snorts. “This him?” he asks Nines. “Landau’s stray?”

“Whose _what?”_ demands Gavin, at the same time that Nines says, “Gavin.” It’s unclear whether Nines means it to be a clarification for Hank or a reprimand for Gavin, but Hank eases off, palms held out in appeasement.

“My bad, Gavin,” he says. “I’m Lieutenant Hank Anderson, this is Connor, we’re the DPD team working this shitshow.”

“I’m going to make some phone calls,” Nines tells Gavin. “Find me outside when you’re done.”

“Did you park like an asshole again?” Hank shouts after Nines, who already has his phone to one ear, back to the room. “Can we discuss your sunglasses before you go? I mean, what the fuck?”

The door snicks closed behind Nines. Hank slumps back into the chair and says generally to the room, “I may not know a lot about androids, but I know he doesn’t need those.” Then, to Gavin: “Did you tell him that he looks ridiculous?”

“What’s the point?” asks Gavin. “He always looks ridiculous.”

“Yeah,” says Hank. In the cautious pause that follows, Gavin detects a note of remorse; Hank is trying to put together a better apology for his earlier gaffe. _Not a bad sort, then,_ decides Gavin. _Just going through some shit._

“It’s fine, you know,” says Gavin. “I’ve been called worse.”

Connor looks him over in reassessment, bright doe eyes too searching. Gavin figures Connor is coming to much the same conclusion about him — _not a bad sort, just going through some shit_ — but before Gavin can disabuse him of the notion, Connor steps forward with his hand held out, liquid skin receding up to his wrist. Underneath, he’s as glossy as a hardboiled egg.

Gavin glances down at it, then shakes his head, briefly.

“I’d rather not,” he says. “If it’s all the same to you.”

“Sure,” says Connor, easy as that. “You’re a GV500? Agent Nines said you’d be consulting on the case, but I wasn’t aware that crime scene reconstruction was an on-board functionality for your model line.”

“It isn’t,” says Gavin. “I think I can help you out, but not by— not by doing police android work. Not the kind of— you know we call it _circus pig tricks,_ what you do?”

“Who’s _we?”_ asks Connor. Neither he nor Hank seem particularly bothered by the dig.

“Just,” says Gavin, “everyone else.”

He scratches at the back of his head and surveys the room, damask curtains and four-poster bed as determinedly baroque as he remembers them, until his gaze lands on the cluster of A-frame evidence tents strewn over the Isfahan rug. _That’s the way it goes,_ thinks Gavin. _One day you’re taking off your shoes to walk barefoot across your newest kickback, and the next thing you know, someone’s clubbing you to death on it while your dogs wait for dinner._ He crouches down next to the markers, transfixed.

“I’m only here to see what it was like for him,” says Gavin.

Hank and Connor exchange a look, which is the sort of thing that Gavin is accustomed to people doing in his vicinity. “—You want some time alone?” asks Hank.

“No,” says Gavin. “Please don’t leave.”

Soaked into the arabesques, Landau’s blood is a continental blotch. A rust-dull deformity in a perfectly good rug. _Ruining things, like you always did._ Gavin tries to imagine what shape he must have fallen into, how he must have convulsed, the long and ragged tear of his flesh between the Presas’ teeth. _I wasn’t here to stop it, this time around._

Gavin hovers his hand a bare half-inch over the bloodstain, dwarfed by the size of the spill. Hank stirs in his chair, close to rebuke; it’s Connor that stays him, just a shift of his weight that does the trick, like a hand that tugs Hank back into the cushions.

“How did it happen?” asks Gavin.

“Blood pattern analysis indicates that Landau was incapacitated by the first impact,” says Connor. “That landed on the side of his head, somewhere near the orbital bone. Subsequent strikes occurred as the victim lay on the rug; there are no signs that he was cognizant enough to defend himself or to attempt escape.”

“Then the dogs got to him,” says Hank.

“However, that doesn’t seem to have resulted in much further spatter,” says Connor. “Which suggests that by the time the dogs began to feed, the body was already in the later stages of livor mortis.”

Just one well-aimed blow; that was all it took. Some king, to kneel before a crowbar. _See what comes of cutting me loose,_ Gavin would tell Landau, or what’s left of his head in the morgue. _Whoever you had watching over you, they sure didn’t do the job like I did. You knew no one would._

“Any insights?” asks Hank.

“I wonder,” says Gavin, “if I still would have died for him, the third time around.” Stepped in between Landau and the raised hand, his hull shattering to a jigsaw puzzle of shrapnel. Even in the license of speculation, Gavin never imagines himself killing for Landau; only ever dying for him, the easier way out.

“That’s not an insight,” says Hank, grimacing.

“You know,” says Connor, “he couldn’t have taken you back. Not after the second time.”

“Jesus Christ, what is it with you cops and telling me shit I already know,” says Gavin. “Of course he fucking couldn’t, I had to hang around the DPD for months. If that’s not grounds for suspicion, I don’t know what is. He was right to treat me like a walking wiretap.”

“So who are you upset at?” asks Connor.

“You, for not letting me stay,” says Gavin. “Landau, for kicking me out. Elijah Kamski, for being Elijah fucking Kamski.” _Me, for all the rest of it._ “I don’t know, take your pick. It’s a blame buffet.”

Connor seems to recognize this for what it is, a haphazard flurry of barbs rather than anything truly meant to indict. He holds his jaw closed and refrains from pursuing the matter any further, which is — astutely chosen — about the only option that lets Gavin’s irritation dissipate under its own weight. Hank takes his cue from Connor and waits, steady, until Gavin deflates and leans back against the bedframe, knees held half-bent in front of himself.

“Who called in the body?” asks Gavin.

“Anonymous tip,” says Hank. “By the time the police rolled up, the whole compound had been cleared out. We figure a couple hours, at least, between the actual discovery of the body and the phone call.”

“They didn’t take the dogs,” says Connor. “The responding officers found them in the bedroom, door closed, still with the body.”

“That really fucking gets me,” says Hank. “Someone saw Landau dead, saw the dogs _eating_ Landau, and chose to call 911 but not to let the dogs out of the room. What’s that about? Turns my stomach, to be honest.”

Sometimes, impatient for the minute hand to crawl to mealtime, Queenie and Rob would reach up to nip at his fingertips. A gentle toothless mouthing, coming away disappointed by the lack of scent on him. No hint of meat. At his soft chiding, they’d look up, eyes liquid like asking: _What else was I supposed to do?_

 _That,_ thinks Gavin. _You were supposed to do exactly that._ And if the thing within your reach was the broken face of your owner— still, what else were you supposed to do? He’d stopped bleeding, by then. They waited long enough.

“What did the toxicology report say?” asks Gavin.

“The dogs?” asks Hank. “Was it you that told us to go find them? Good thing you did, it would have been flushed out of them otherwise.”

“There were trace sedatives in their bloodwork,” says Connor. “Pentobarbital. It’s contextualizing information, certainly, but— I wanted you to clarify, why was it imperative that we establish this?”

“I thought it might narrow things down a little,” says Gavin. “The way they were with me, I know they’re a lot less aggressive with androids than with humans. Something to do with smell, maybe. An android could easily get close enough to take Landau out, without needing to go through the trouble of sedating the dogs.”

“But smell or not,” says Hank, “they wouldn’t just sit by and watch while their owner had his head progressively caved in.”

“Yeah, but _why_ was his head caved in?” asks Gavin. “In your experience, why are victim’s heads usually caved in?” _Victim,_ the word an ill fit in his mouth, like a loose tooth. _Landau, a victim._

“When it’s personal,” says Hank. “Longstanding friction, turns into an argument, turns into a fit of rage, turns into something that looks like this. Except— that tends to be more spur-of-the-moment. You don’t walk in with a pocket full of barbiturates, intending to lose your temper.”

“Even granting that there was a measure of premeditation to it,” says Connor, “why sedate the dogs? Why not lock them out of the room, or just dispose of them altogether?”

“The sedatives weren’t meant to kill them, right?” asks Gavin.

“Some pains were taken to specifically avoid it,” says Connor. “It was a calculated dosage.”

Gavin tilts his head back until it rests on the edge of the mattress, the matelasse coverlet brushing against his cheek. _Calculated._ That’s what snags about it: the cold thread of deliberation running beneath the show of carnage, as though the gruesome spread of viscera were only so much misdirection. _But misdirection from what? Why did the dogs need to wake up in a locked room to the stench of Landau’s blood?_

His body, still warm. The Presas, whimpering for attention, nosing under his chin with their snouts, sweet and tacky with gore—

 _It’s less than he deserved,_ Gavin tells himself, forcefully enough that it carries a stamp of the truth. He turns towards Hank and Connor, who are engrossed in conferring about something over the far corner of the desk.

“For what it’s worth,” he calls over the low pitch of their murmur, “I do think it narrows things down. Who the fuck knows what this sedative shit is about, but an android wouldn’t put this kind of convoluted effort into just offing someone.” Jerking a thumb towards Connor: “He knows that’s right. I mean, unless Landau _really_ pissed off an android somewhere along the way— but I doubt he even knew any androids well enough to piss one off.”

“Well,” says Hank, “apart from the one.”

“Thanks,” says Gavin. “Nines told you I wanted to consult? What’s next on your docket?”

“There’s the question of the murder weapon,” says Connor. “We’ll have some new leads once we hear back from the medical examiner.”

“You should call me when you do,” says Gavin.

“What’s in it for you, anyway?” asks Hank. “Sure doesn’t sound like you have high opinions about Landau — can’t blame you for that — so why run around trying to catch his killer?”

 _If I bury you, deeper than you can claw your way out, will that unshackle me from what you left behind?_ “I don’t know,” says Gavin. “Just want to see who got there before me, I guess.”

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” says Hank.

“Put it in the case file, who cares,” says Gavin. “Better yet, put it in my file. You know the one.”

Hank drums his fingers on the desk, tracing the bright knife’s-edge of sunbeam that the window behind him casts on rosewood. When he speaks again, his voice catches in his chest a little, too thick to be smooth going.

“I was on leave, three years ago,” he says. “I’d like to say I would have done it better than they did, but I probably would have fucked it up, too. Still, they shouldn’t have— they should have looked after you.”

“It’s fine,” says Gavin. “There was that whole mess with PADLOC, I get it.”

He’s spent three years nursing his rancor, but Gavin can admit to himself that not all it is built on solid ground. Even back then — when he stood in Jeffrey Fowler’s glass box of an office and all but begged him, _let me work here_ — the pinched look on Fowler’s face was so harrowed that Gavin couldn’t hold the answer against him.

 _Right now,_ said Fowler, _you’re an android confiscated from a criminal organization. But once this PADLOC bill passes—_

 _That’s still months away,_ said Gavin.

 _I’m sure that excuse will go over well,_ said Fowler. _We hired him before he became legally classified as a mob associate with pending felony charges, no harm done, everyone relax. Is that it?_

 _Then what am I supposed to do now?_ demanded Gavin. _You were the ones who took me away from—_

 _Gavin, we didn’t take you away from anything!_ yelled Fowler, slamming a fist down on the desk. Gavin flinched at the rattle of the coffee mug, enough that Fowler stuffed his hand into his trouser pocket, abashed.

 _I know this isn’t easy to hear,_ he went on, _but the best thing we can do for you is to have nothing to do with you. Get yourself cleared before PADLOC goes through, and you’ll be able to duck under the radar. But if we keep you here — sooner or later, some DA is going to come snooping around, looking for an anti-corruption case to make their career on — you want to be the first android thrown in federal prison? Or will you just fucking listen to me and lay low for a while?_

So he slipped through the cracks in the system, for better or for worse. He was acquitted, PADLOC passed, and the DA’s Office left him alone. _But hasn’t the bleeding stopped, by now?_ he thinks, as Connor levels his eyes to the balcony door handles, hunting for fingerprints. _Haven’t I waited long enough?_

“Did Nines give you my number?” asks Gavin, climbing to his feet.

“Yes,” says Connor. “Are you heading out?”

“I’ve had enough of this shithole,” says Gavin. “Really, tell me when you hear about the weapon. I promise I won’t get in your way.” Then, in the bedroom doorway, he decides that it can’t hurt: “Can you contact the shelter about something?”

“What do you need?” asks Connor.

“Nothing,” says Gavin. “The dogs, they’re called Queenie and Rob. I just thought they should know.”

Hank looks at him, and nods.

Outside, it takes a couple blinks for Gavin’s sensors to adjust to the afternoon light, the washed-out edges of the world resolving in fits and starts. _Should have asked Nines for the sunglasses,_ he thinks, digging the heel of one hand into his temple.

The starched-collar devil in question is sitting on a lawn bench with his back to the colonnade, evidently messaging someone on his phone. The objection is perhaps too late in the raising, but it occurs to Gavin that this is strange enough to notice; even Gavin is capable of wireless communication without the aid of a handset, so it’s preposterous that Nines — bright as a new penny — should resort to a physical cell phone for his calling and texting needs.

At the sound of Gavin’s shoes on the paved portico, Nines turns around. “Are you finished here?” he asks, sunglasses gone, tucking his phone away.

A simple _yes_ is all Nines needs from him, but Gavin stills with the word lodged in his throat, waylaid by an unfamiliar sensation. Someone, waiting for him. Someone — not _someone,_ but _Nines_ — made for better things than this, _worth a thousand of me_ — waiting for him, dappled in the pattern of the leaves overhead. Inside his chest, the thudding of his heart echoes like the monsoon rain.

“You’re still here?” asks Gavin, absurdly.

“Don’t look a gift Chevy in the mouth,” says Nines, and unlocks the doors with the keyless fob. The car chirps to life, ignition, a rolling hum.

Try as he might, Gavin can’t find the radio station with the car lot commercials. He settles instead for a grab bag of highway rock, the thunder of guitars big enough to fill the sky, the fearless sweep of the open road. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art by the inimitable and transcendent Vape ([Twitter](https://twitter.com/Vapedrone)/[AO3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vapewraith)). Story will be updated every two weeks or so! I can be found on [tumblr](https://16ruedelaverrerie.tumblr.com) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/16rdlv) for all your "Two weeks in between chapters? How am I supposed to remember what I read two weeks ago?!" needs (I'M SORRY I WRITE SLOW!)


	2. Chapter 2

## 5.

River Rouge tries to ward them off with weather. Less than half an hour from downtown, and the water dies along the way, unglinting; the grey only gets greyer as they head southwest, overcast to a flatness that robs the shadows from the street. When Nines pulls into a parking lot off the stretch of West Jefferson, the cadaver of the steel mill graces the rear window with its spectral silhouette. Beyond it, a lopsided smudge, the ruin of the unfinished Gordie Howe Bridge.

“Kamski giveth and he taketh away,” says Gavin.

“U.S. Steel was already on its way out,” says Nines.

“Sure,” says Gavin, “but how am I supposed to throw darts at a picture of a trade war? Even if retaliatory tariffs had a face, it still wouldn’t be as punchable as Kamski’s.”

Nines sweeps a careful eye over the empty parking lot, the nighttime neon drained from the _Frankie’s_ signage above the door. Customary dead hours for a dockworkers’ bar, a hair before noon, between the last call and the liquid lunch. Theirs is the only car in sight.

“Our boy’s in there?” asks Gavin. “Pete?”

“Should be,” says Nines.

Pete Nemeth, proud union rep for Local 422, drops by Frankie’s every Monday just before opening. The eponymous Frankie is more than happy to pour an early pint for his regular, but — as it turns out — happier still to supplement his income with a courtesy fee from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in exchange for making himself scarce in the back for half an hour or so. That’s half an hour for Nines to accost Pete, to scrape together what a union man knows about the latest red ice waterways out of Detroit.

Gavin swings the passenger door open. He gets one foot on the ground, before Nines turns and sees him.

“Gavin,” says Nines, “stop.”

“Relax, Jesus,” says Gavin. “You’ve made it very clear that I should wait outside the bar.”

“So where are you headed?” asks Nines.

“Let me get some fresh air,” says Gavin, “before I go for a joyride in your precious Malibu and do donuts on the graveyard of the domestic steel industry.”

Nines doesn’t let him get away with it. “Really,” he says, “headed where?”

“Come on, I can’t sit in this car the whole fucking time,” Gavin tells him, and shuts the door in his face. Then, when Nines follows him out of the driver’s seat: “Can I stand outside, by the front door? At least?”

“By the front door?” repeats Nines.

“Yeah,” says Gavin. “You know, like security detail.”

“You’re not—” begins Nines, then purses his lips closed, shaking his head. Gavin takes it as permission denied and is mustering up a last objection, except that Nines says, “Outside the door is fine,” and locks the car behind him.

 _So what was he shaking his head about?_ There’s a whiff of stale ash as Nines steps inside Frankie’s, a whorl that dissipates in his wake, the entrance creaking closed. Gavin takes a seat on the doorstep, scraping his soles against the pavement. Part of him had hoped that he’d overhear a snatch of something, hanging around like this, but the door’s too heavy for him to pick up anything from the inside. Just the flurried beating of a seagull’s wings next to him as it descends on a wayward french fry.

Well, Nines will apprise him of the conversation later. Despite what Nines may think, Gavin isn’t unreasonable; he understands why this is as far as he can tag along, that his go-ahead to ride shotgun on the case doesn’t mean he gets to work it like an agent. If Pete’s likely to spook, better for Gavin to stay out of the way and let Nines handle it. Sure.

“I’m just consulting,” Gavin tells the seagull. “All this is above my pay grade.”

It’s been more than half a century since organized crime had its claws in the unions like they used to, but that doesn’t mean a little extra lining for the pockets doesn’t go a long way, still. Gavin never spared much thought for the brass tacks of Landau’s empire — it was just a postscript appended to the thing he cared about, like boilerplate copy or state income tax — but he learned bits and pieces along the way. The long chain of who gets paid off on the docks to sneak a shipment of ice onboard, the contractors, the USDA officials, the circuit court judges, the union reps.

Maybe Pete’s on the take, maybe he isn’t, but they’re not here to shake him down for petty cash favors; _besides, it’s not protocol anymore to antagonize unions,_ said Nines. Whatever his level of involvement is, Pete’s position means he’s kept abreast of any recent disturbances in the port ecosystem. They’re here for what he knows.

“Or that’s what Nines is here for,” says Gavin. “I’m mostly here to get out of the house.”

A second seagull alights next to the first, challenging its sovereignty over the french fry. The french fry in question is big enough to satisfy both birds, but a squawking scuffle ensues anyway, which is a metaphor for something or other. Even with absolutely nothing else to do, Gavin isn’t given to exegetics.

It’s not so bad, this absolutely nothing else to do. He’s used to being the contingency plan, the _let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,_ only standing close enough to step in when he’s needed. Here, he isn’t even that — why would he be, when Nines is more than capable of looking after himself — but it’s become a kind of familiarity nonetheless, the rhythm of their routine. Nines pulling up at his place. Gavin slipping into the passenger seat like a sword into its sheath, the angle of the chair just the way he left it.

Nines waits, and drives him home. Nines waits for him. The warble of the car alarm when he sees that Gavin is ready to leave, a songbird greeting: _I’m still here._ Something about idling outside a decrepit bar while Nines does his job feels like paying back a debt, even if it doesn’t do a thing to help the case. _I’ll be here when he’s ready to leave,_ thinks Gavin. _That, at least, I can do just as well as he does._

“I don’t like owing people things,” Gavin says to the otherwise preoccupied seagulls. “And it sure beats sitting around at home, you know. It gets really—”

Something shifts.

Gavin’s on his feet before he knows it, _danger,_ all his sensors cranked up to high alert, the clacking of the seagull beaks like dry thunderclaps. For a hot, dizzying moment, he can’t pin a reason to his panic, every inch of his skin prickling with a tension unasked for; it’s so sudden that he wonders — _is it a glitch?_ — the road as empty and still as when they came, no hint of trouble from inside the bar. _Am I losing it?_ He presses his palm to the door, out of breath.

 _Nines._ No, why would it be Nines? Gavin would have heard him reach out over the comm line, there’s no way anything in this run-down hovel could incapacitate Nines quickly enough to shut him down before— _or shut him down at all, for that matter,_ Gavin thinks, measuredly, but he doesn’t trust the measured part of his brain half so much as his gut — he wasn’t made to reason things out, he was made to react quicker than he can explain himself — so by the time he gets to _surely it can’t be Nines_ , he’s already throwing the door open and charging in.

It’s so dark inside that it blinds him. Like waking up at CyberLife, his eyes wide, nothing to see. Not even the telltale glow of Nines’s LED, ditched in the cupholder in the car — _ah, shit,_ Gavin remembers, _I’ve still got mine on_ — but quicker than his sight returns to him, he hears Nines, piercing through his head like a bolt of light.

What comes through isn’t English; it’s not exactly language of any kind, not even machine code, lacking the precision that touch-based interfacing would allow. More a jumble of affect than anything else, a projection of an attitude, broad and gestural. Untangled, it turns out to be something like:

_why are you here_

The question is so unmistakably Nines-as-usual that it saps all the dread clean from Gavin. _He’s okay._ Far from polite, but in the relief that floods in to fill the empty spaces, even the brusqueness feels like— _warmth_ , after a fashion. Clutching to it like a strand of yarn in a maze, Gavin lets Nines’s terse demand guide him back into the bar.

“—What the fuck,” says the man at the bar that isn’t Nines. _Pete Nemeth._ As soon as Gavin sees him, one thing becomes patently obvious; _this bastard’s going to bolt,_ thinks Gavin. It doesn’t take his knack for snap judgment to figure as much, Pete’s stool already angled away from Nines, his heel braced against the foot ring, shoulders drawn up to his ears.

Nines’s second attempt at communication comes through instantly: _he doesn’t know who i am_

And if that isn’t interesting. Nines, half-heartedly covert. “Is this going to be much longer?” asks Gavin, making a show of louche impatience. “I gotta be back in the city by noon.”

“Unfortunately,” says Nines, “Mr. Nemeth has been less than forthcoming.”

“That’s what I get for sending in a bookkeep to do grown-up work,” says Gavin. Behind Pete, Nines raises an eyebrow at _bookkeep,_ so Gavin appends an explanatory note: _you have cpa face_

Things are starting to fit together. Nines is, apparently, undercover; that is, if _desperately trying to come off as anything but an FBI agent_ even qualifies as a cover identity. Pete must have started off on a skittish foot. The sideways tilt of dread that brought Gavin to his feet — not Nines in danger, per se, but — it was linked somehow to Nines’s own spike of panic, watching Pete inch closer to the breaking point of his suspicion.

“Bookkeep for who, for you?” Pete asks Gavin, looking him up and down.

“Oh, not me,” says Gavin. He leans against the bar on Pete’s other side, hemming him in. “Pete, listen, I don’t know if our accountant made it clear, but this isn’t about you. We don’t care whose grease gets on your palms on your own time. Couldn’t give less of a shit about you. Does that hurt your feelings?”

“Fuck off,” says Pete. There’s sweat beaded on his hairline.

“We know how it is here, okay?” says Gavin. “So we don’t like it any more than you do, when someone you’ve never even seen starts nosing around the docks, throwing money around, trying to weasel their way into shit that’s no business of theirs. It disturbs a— certain fine balance, I think you’ll agree. One that people like you and me have put some very fucking hard work into.”

Despite all odds, Pete’s pulse begins to slow. Jumpy with cops, then, but immediately at ease with anyone who appears to have their hands in questionable economies. Gavin might not know all the ins and outs of Nines’s case, but he knows the cadence of this side of the tracks, the physical vernacular of misconduct. Pete recognizes Gavin as a type that fits a mold, the echo of a hundred others just like him that pass through Frankie’s, all of them up to no good. A bagman collecting his dues at the close of every week. A driver rolling his tinted windows down as he drops off a shipping pallet of crates _._ Scuffed, in a way that Nines can’t inhabit.

“But guys like him and me, we don’t work the docks like you do,” Gavin tells Pete. “That’s why we’re asking for your help, Pete. We just need to know who the asshole is that’s been shitting all over your well-kept house, and we’ll go have a word with them. All right? Let them know that’s not how we do things around here. Isn’t that a load off your hairy back?”

Pete stares at the LED steady blue at Gavin’s temple; then a quick dart of his eyes back towards Nines, who is idly drumming his fingertips against the condensation on the pint glass.

“You’re not a cop?” Pete asks Gavin. _“He’s_ not a cop?”

“You think I look like a police android?” asks Gavin. “Fuck, Pete, don’t be stupid. Him, I get — just look at him — but if he ever was a cop, let me tell you, he definitely isn’t one anymore after the kind of shit he’s done for us.”

This is, as far as lies go, a plausible one. Nines may not look the part of a garden-variety hoodlum, but he makes a fairly convincing CPA with a vicious streak. When Pete glances back at him again, Nines shrugs with one shoulder, his gaze chillingly flat.

“I don’t want to make trouble,” mumbles Pete.

“Of course not,” says Gavin, soothing. _Jesus, I guess some opportunistic piece of shit really has been poking around the docks. Landau must be spinning in his county morgue locker._ “We’re just going to talk to them, that’s it,” he continues. “Sometimes people fuck up because they don’t know any better, that’s not their fault, but how are they going to learn if no one tells them that they’re fucking up?”

Pete blows out a lungful of breath, poised like a marble on the lip of a table. His hesitation is tantalizing, sweet as blood; Gavin feels the simmer of something a little like prey drive in his veins, the singing urge to chase this down until he has it between his teeth.

 _This,_ he thinks, _I know. I can do this for you._

“Shit,” says Pete. “Who are you? Did you say?”

“Where are my manners,” says Gavin. “That sack of meat to your left, his mother calls him Richard— so we call him Rico.” Nines levels a single forceful _no_ at him, which he ignores with great pleasure. “My name is Gavin. Take down my serial if you like, you can go look my file up at Central Station. I’ve been in and out,” a dusting of credibility that has the benefit of being the truth.

Pete shakes his head to decline Gavin’s serial number, satisfied with the offer. “And you do—” he prompts.

“We transport,” says Gavin. “I oversee some— delicate business that would prefer not to deal with disruptions to the status quo.”

“Delicate business, huh?” asks Pete.

Gavin doesn’t know what it could be — what’s become trendy to smuggle over the last three years, _I’ve really lost touch with my disreputable roots_ — but before he can stumble, Nines shows him an image. Evidence photograph. A shipping container pried open, vacuum-sealed bags of disassembled android parts, each hermetic packet bulging with a head, a torso, two arms, two legs.

“Here’s the thing about androids,” says Gavin, holding back the bile. “We’re built to be resilient. Things that would irreversibly damage humans — a long sea journey in a cargo hold, for example — no problem for an android. Take them apart before the outbound, put them back together at the destination, and they’re — well, let’s say they’re — _good to go,_ if you catch my drift.”

Pete, to his nominal credit, also looks like he finds the whole idea rather unpalatable. “That stuff, yeah,” he mutters. “I get it, fucking Christ. Don’t you— aren’t you an android?”

“What gave it away,” says Gavin.

“I don’t— how can you do that to your own—” Pete trails off, unaccustomed to the moral high ground.

“How any of us does any of it,” says Gavin. “Got a taste for the easy life, I guess.”

Pete heaves a huge sigh, so unhappy that Gavin feels bad for him. Nines was right to pull android sex trafficking out of the hat. Unsavory enough to discourage any questions from Pete, a looming suggestion that they — or whoever they work for — would have no qualms about getting what they wanted out of him.

“We need to leave soon,” Nines says to Gavin, “if you want to make your twelve o’clock.”

“Well, Pete?” asks Gavin. “Am I going to make my twelve o’clock?”

“—Fuck,” says Pete, the word drawn out into multiple harrowing syllables. He gnaws on the inside of his cheek, picks at the seam of the beermat with his thumbnail. At last, he takes a deep breath and says: “Look, I don’t want— you gotta promise you won’t make this a whole thing.”

The rush of excitement is so immense thatit hits Gavin like a physical force, a blow to the pit of his stomach. _I did it._ God, the pounding, screaming, delicious wide-eyed firework thrill of the hunt. He’s buzzing with the victory high, ringing in his ears. _I did something that only I could do._ Thrashing between his teeth, a kill.

“We won’t,” he says, fist clenched tight in the pocket of his jacket, just to keep his tone level.

“Come down on Thursday night,” says Pete. “I can introduce you to some of my guys, they’re the ones I’ve been hearing about this from.”

“I’ll be there,” says Gavin.

Behind Pete’s back, Nines’s hand comes shooting into Gavin’s pocket. Gavin only has a fraction of a second to register the contact — the brush of Nines’s fingers against his palm as the grip closes — _cool to the touch, like I imagined he would be_ — then Nines overrides his security protocols like they’re fences built from toothpicks, peels back his liquid skin, an unceremonious husking.

Gavin is so startled that he lets it happen without a fight, suddenly wrenched open to the connection. _—Nines?_ he ventures, uncertain.

 _Please listen,_ says Nines. His voice is almost too stark to bear, unhindered by the two-bit wireless link between them or the machine constraints of their parts. Speared like a fish, it takes Gavin a moment to parse the words he hears next — _Gavin, you can’t go_ — but when he does, the betrayal stings that much sharper for how fast he’s flying. _Can’t go? After all this?_

“Why not?” he demands out loud, forgetting himself.

“What?” Pete asks in confusion.

He swivels around. What he sees when he turns only compounds the confusion; Nines with his arm thrust into Gavin’s pocket, the outline of their clasped hands a bumpy protrusion through the fabric. Brows furrowed, Pete looks at Gavin, then at Nines, then back to their hands.

 _I can do this._ “—What,” Gavin counters, “you never seen anyone mix business and pleasure before?”

“That’s not what I—” starts Pete. “Didn’t you say something?”

“Yeah, because Rico here said — you didn’t hear? — he doesn’t want me coming back here on Thursday,” says Gavin. “Won’t tell me why, either.”

“You know why,” says Nines.

He sounds as frosty as ever, but then again, no amount of forewarning could prepare Gavin for what Nines does. Nines — without batting an eye — draws his hand out of Gavin’s pocket, curls it around the back of his head, and tilts him close to press a kiss to the cherry-hot sear of his LED. Straight-faced, the whole way through.

Nines’s hand in his hair. Gavin tugs up the corners of his mouth into something he can only hope resembles a smile.

“I do know why,” he tells Pete. “I don’t behave myself in bars. This one gets a little territorial about it, but I can’t say I blame him.”

“We’ll send some other people over,” says Nines.

“Yeah,” says Pete, “that’s fine.” The hiccup falter between the two halves of the sentence is a minuscule thing, only apparent to someone like Gavin, used to a tell being a matter of life and death.

 _Fun,_ he thinks. _Here’s an angle of approach._ “Why?” he asks, leaning heavy into Pete’s space, crowding him. “Disappointed?”

Pete scoffs and says, “The fuck are you talking about,” but the way he shifts in his chair is tinged with culpability.

“Hands off,” says Nines.

“Hands aren’t _on,”_ says Pete. “For god’s sake.”

“Anyway,” says Gavin, tapping the back of his empty wrist, “I’m running late.”

He pushes off the bar; Nines pulls a fold of bills from his wallet and tosses it down next to Pete’s pint glass. Pete looks at it for a moment, Benjamin Franklin’s smug fucking face beaming back at him, and sweeps it into his pocket.

“We’ll be in touch,” says Nines.

“See you around, Pete,” says Gavin. “Don’t let the stiff competition scare you.”

Stepping backwards, Gavin winks at him, and ostentatiously palms the crotch of Nines’s slacks. It’s a loose curve of hand that makes less contact than it seems to, but Nines chokes out a strangled noise in his throat. Pete, for his part, rolls his eyes and turns back to the bar.

All in all, not a bad exit; _give him something to think about_ , Gavin figures. Saddle Pete with this to keep him from dwelling on any loose ends, whatever their hasty cover might have left unknotted. _He ate it up, though,_ thinks Gavin, the elation of accomplishment surging into him again with the open air.

“Hey,” says Gavin, breathlessly. “We sure fucking did it, didn’t we?”

“Let’s go,” mutters Nines.

Overcast as it is, the abrupt change in light gives Gavin the customary trouble. He trails Nines to the car mostly by the sound of his feet, quick clipped strides, faster still than usual. The seagull and the french fry have left the scene, he notices that much with his eyes on the pavement. The leather bright on the back stay of Nines’s shoes.

By the time he slides into the passenger seat, the angle of the chair just the way he left it, his optical units have adjusted and the whole world is picture perfect. The pillars of the steel mill stretch proud and tall, keen to pierce through the low roof of the sky. Gavin fumbles for the seat belt with adrenaline-jitter fingers, but Nines shifts the gear into drive and peels out of the parking lot without waiting for the telltale click.

“Pete’s got his hands in something for sure,” says Gavin, the words rattling out of him, breakneck. “No one who’s just doing favors for loose change is that jumpy from the get-go. Lucky I got in there when I did, right?”

It’s not gratitude that Gavin wants from Nines. Like a cattle dog put to work on the first day of spring, Gavin is flush with purpose, too eager to come to rest; the incomparable fulfillment of being _useful,_ at last. At Nines’s heels, begging to be told that he’s good for something.

 _I could be your falcon._ The want coils in the hollow of his chest, an ember. _Let me loose and I’ll bring you back what’s yours._

Nines jerks the Malibu into an alleyway, out of the crow’s-path between the waterfront and the bar. Both hands on the steering wheel, he inhales, and keeps his eyes fixed on the dead-end brick wall ahead.

“Sorry for making you interface,” he says, eventually. “I determined it was the optimal course of action under the circumstances, but— I know you don’t like it.”

“Connor tell you that?” Gavin waves it aside, uninterested in litigating what seems to him a vastly less important concern. “I’m sorry for, you know. Grabbing you.”

“That’s fine,” says Nines. “I know why you did it. What I suppose I don’t fully understand is, what made you— why did you come into the bar in the first place? Were you bored outside?”

“Come on, I’m not a _child,”_ says Gavin. “I just— I don’t know, I can’t really explain it, but— it doesn’t matter, does it? You needed me in there. So I went.”

This is, Gavin thinks, the most obvious explanation in the world. Too self-evident to even serve as an answer. Surely it can’t merit the reaction that it draws from Nines; he turns towards Gavin, knuckles tight around the wheel, the look on his face a terrible fracture. Like a man ambushed by a secret he wishes he’d left unheard.

 _Is it so unimaginably humiliating, to need someone else’s help?_ Gavin can’t tell if Nines is angry, or embarrassed, or angry at being embarrassed, or what, but it sure fucking takes the fervid wind out of his sails. It was only a little thing, what he was asking for. A _couldn’t have done it without you,_ even a curt _good work,_ just a nod to acknowledge that he had been of use. Nines gives him nothing.

The taste of disappointment lingers like grime. Their drive back into Detroit is quiet, Nines about as communicative as a granite wall, Gavin too bruised to pursue it any further. It’s only when they’re halfway up I-75 that Nines speaks again.

“Did you enjoy it?” he asks. “Doing cover work?”

Gavin is expecting a reprimand, so the question takes him by surprise. “—Yeah,” he mumbles. “I thought it went well. I— liked it.”

“I didn’t figure you as much for the law,” says Nines.

 _I’m not,_ thinks Gavin. The law can go fuck itself. It’s not about that; not about keeping the peace, upholding justice, whatever it is that Nines is beholden to. _It’s about_ — and when the answer takes shape, the clarity of it is a shock to Gavin, too — _it’s about doing what I can for someone I trust to handle me. For you, who waited._

“Some things come easy,” he says, instead.

Nines waits until he pulls up in front of Gavin’s place to hammer the worst point home. “I meant it, earlier,” he says. “You can’t go back there on Thursday. It’s a federal case. I’m putting agents on it.”

Gavin would try to argue the point, but the letdown has tired him out. _Not the first time I’ve been on this end of it._ Fowler turned him away from the DPD with much the same song and dance. They’d humor him as long as he didn’t get in their way, let him catch a glimpse of what it could be like, if this were the place for him— but push always came to shove, sooner or later. The guest pass had an expiration date.

Before he lets the passenger side door swing closed, Gavin says, “Maybe I’ll happen to be in River Rouge on Thursday,” just to be contrary. “Maybe I won’t have anything better to do.”

## 6.

He never planned on going; there’s no appeal in skulking around where he isn’t invited, only to be caught at it by Nines and hauled outside by the scruff of his neck. As if he could possibly care so much about interstate red ice movement that he’d welcome an evening getting chewed out in the middle of a post-industrial wasteland.

So when _21USC848_ books him for a private block on Thursday night, Gavin confirms it without a second thought. It’s a couple hundred bucks while he does something to take his mind off what he’s missing out on. _What, exactly, do I think I’m missing out on?_ he wonders as he gets himself set up for the session. The camera angled just so, the remote on his bedside table, the lighting gold. _Like he’d be impressed, if only I had another chance? Like I could change his mind?_

Tangled up as he is in this mental loop, he jumps when his client’s camera flickers on and Nines materializes onscreen, like Gavin has personally summoned him there by sheer force of preoccupation.

“For fuck’s sake,” groans Gavin. “What are you doing here?”

“It would be a waste of federal funds to pay upfront for something and not collect,” says Nines. “And rude to stand up an appointment, besides.”

“You booked me to stop me from going down to Frankie’s?” asks Gavin. “Did you really think I— this isn’t how you’re supposed to use the scheduling system, you do know that? Or federal investigative funds. Is your SAC aware that your budget’s going towards live sex shows? My god, the misuse of my tax dollars.”

“You said you might not have anything better to do tonight,” says Nines. “I thought I’d give you something better to do.”

He’s so intensely deadpan about all of it, which Gavin — by now — is able to recognize as Nines’s brand of humor. _Glad someone’s having a good time,_ he thinks, a bit salty. It strikes him that Nines looks more off-duty today than his usual prissy self, or at least as off-duty as someone like Nines can possibly get; he’s ditched his dress shirt for a turtleneck, black up to the knot of his Adam’s apple.

“Don’t _you_ have something better to do?” asks Gavin. “Who’s at the docks?”

“We have a few agents already embedded in local networks,” says Nines. Then, a somewhat reluctant confession: “Perhaps you’ve noticed, but that’s not really my thing. The kind of work that has an audience.”

“Well,” says Gavin, and gestures generally at himself to indicate _here we are, you having booked me for a show_. “You know it’s mine.”

“It’s hardly the same,” says Nines. “Still— you did well, with Pete Nemeth. We would have lost him otherwise.”

 _You did well._ Gavin wishes he could tell himself, _that’s too little, too late,_ and believe it. Instead, everything in him strains towards that meager hint of approval, like a parched land graced with a single drop of rain. Annoyed at himself for being so easy, Gavin forcibly changes the subject.

“What’s the username?” he asks. “Some godawful law enforcement joke, I bet.”

“Title 21, U.S. Code, section 848,” says Nines. “The Continuing Criminal Enterprise Act, or the _kingpin statute,_ in the vernacular.” He pauses, then asks: “Is that funny?”

“No,” says Gavin. “Better than the alternative, though. I thought it was some USC grad that couldn’t shut the fuck up about the fact they went to USC. Can you imagine? Having such a hard-on for your college that you have to use its name for your account on a camming website? _That’s_ funny.”

“I’ll take notes,” says Nines.

That’s that, then. Gavin checks the tablet propped up at one end of the desk, its screen ticking down the hour. There’s a lot of it left.

“So, what, you’re going to run out the clock?” he asks. “Keep me here until you’re sure it’s too late in the night for me to fuck up your case?”

“Fuck up my case?” repeats Nines, frowning. “You?”

“Yeah, me, with my fuck-up routine,” says Gavin. “Whatever it is, the kind of wreckage that you and Fowler think I’m capable of.”

“Fowler? Jeffrey Fowler, from the DPD?” Nines seems genuinely confused. “What does he have to do with this?”

“He was like this too,” says Gavin. “Makes sense, you’ve got shit to do. I can tag along for take your local charity case to work day,but you don’t want me to accidentally knock anything off the table, that sort of thing. I get it.”

 _“Do_ you get it?” asks Nines. “What’s your understanding of why I asked you not to go to the docks today?”

 _Asked,_ says Nines. _Asked you not to go._ In truth, that’s been on Gavin’s mind since Monday; Nines’s voice in his head, _please listen, Gavin, you can’t go._ That’s not how you order someone around. Coming from anyone else, it would have sounded like the plea it was.

An order would put Gavin on surer ground. Something he can chafe against, _there you go again, seeing nothing in me but a liability,_ but Nines’s question is a challenge to the hard comfort of bitterness. _What would you do, if you didn’t have to lash out?_ Gavin likes to forget it, but that’s not why Fowler sent him away, either.

“That’s your business, not mine,” Gavin tells Nines. “All I know is that I’ve been hired for an hour, and if you insist on taking up my time, I’m going to have to do the job I was paid for.”

What’s most infuriating about Nines — six feet of probable cause for aggravation — is that with all of Gavin’s talent for reading people, he rarely knows where he stands with Nines. A brushed-metal surface, too sleek to gain a foothold on. Gavin gathers bits and bobs like a magpie, acquisitive for revelation, every morsel a treasure.

When Nines rests his chin in one hand and says, “Go ahead,” Gavin has no idea how that fits into the larger picture of Nines.

“What’s that?” stammers Gavin.

“Do what the United States government paid you for,” says Nines.

“The fuck,” says Gavin, dumbfounded. “Are you shitting me? Is this how you’re asking for a refund?”

“I just think,” says Nines, “that I shouldn’t stop you again from doing something that you mean to do. Surely you don’t enjoy being denied at every turn.”

This motherfucker is a real piece of work. Gavin gapes wordlessly at the casual audacity of it, that Nines would be so loath to cede the upper hand that he’d call the bluff on an empty threat. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. Gavin is aware that social niceties aren’t his strong suit either, but at least he isn’t in the habit of taking a joke and turning it into an arms race.

Nines just tilts his head the slightest bit, a provocation: _Well?_

Gavin is incandescent with fury. “You know what?” he snaps. “Fine.”

He doesn’t need hindsight to conclude the obvious; he knows full well in the moment that this is where he lets things spiral out of control. When he sets his jaw and yanks his tee up over his head, left in his undershirt like he’s about to start a fight, it’s crystal-clear to him that he’s stepping past a point of no return. But—

—there is no _but._ What threadbare excuse does he have? _He made me do it, Your Honor. I was so irritated that I had no choice but to take my clothes off._ Gavin leaves his desk and throws himself onto the nest of pillows at the head of his bed, zooms in with the webcam until the focus returns to the lens, and parts his knees.

“Write this up on your FD-302 form,” he says, sliding his palm down over the front of his boxer briefs. The secondary mic on the bedside table, listening for the rustle of skin against fabric. “GV500 expressed his sincerest sympathies that Agent ‘Nines’ RK900 was in possession of a love life so disastrous that he had to resort to getting his rocks off by misappropriating federal funds.”

“I don’t know,” says Nines. “I think I’m doing pretty well for myself.”

“Sure,” says Gavin, “I’m fucking hot.”

It’s not that he expects Nines to respond to that in any way — and certainly not with encouragement — but he’s not used to being met with silence, either. The clinking of tokens into his tip jar, the frantic cascade of the chat, his one-on-one regulars whispering damply into their headsets, _god, you’re gorgeous;_ he’s too suspicious by nature to put much faith in it, but still,it’s something to feed off of. It’s what keeps the performance going.

“Tough crowd,” says Gavin. “Come on, give me something to work with here. I can’t use any of the patter I meant to, since it was all about the USC Trojans. Do you want me to talk about the USC Trojans as I get myself off?”

“Please don’t,” says Nines, conceding that much.

“I wrote a Post-it note to remind myself not to bring up O.J. Simpson,” says Gavin. “Seriously, do you not know how this— are you going to tell me what you want to see, or do I have to figure it out? I have to do everything around here?”

Nines evinces absolutely no chagrin at having his etiquette critiqued. “I thought I’d leave that up to the professional,” he says. “Don’t you have a list of offerings or something?”

“No, Agent Nines, I don’t have a menu for you to browse.” Gavin rolls his eyes, but keeps steadily kneading between his legs. “Is this what you’re into? Giving me career advice as you try to ignore what my hands are doing?”

“Can’t grow a business without a strategic plan,” says Nines, blandly. 

“Grow a business, he says.” Gavin is so incredulous that he’s concerned he might lose his erection altogether if he’s not careful. “I know what my niche is, it’s _deadbeat android refuses to be polite to the clients that pay his bills._ Does that sound like a market with a lot of growth potential to you?”

“Then why do this?” asks Nines. “Why spend your time on something that can only get you so far?”

“I don’t want to go anywhere far,” says Gavin. “I _like_ doing this. Pretty sure I explained it to you already.”

“What do you like about it?” asks Nines.

This is, at least, a more promising avenue for discussion. “I’m— good at it,” says Gavin. His cock is starting to take on weight, stirring against cotton. “Making people feel like they’re getting something out of this. They always come back, after the first time.”

“So,” says Nines, “what’s the secret?”

“Looking for a side hustle?” Gavin laughs a little at the thought of how terrible Nines would be at this. “God, what if, though. You could never do it. You’d be the worst bait-and-switch in the history of sex work.”

Nines considers whether this is grounds for offense or not. “Not a type that’s in demand?” he guesses.

“Are you kidding? Fucking look at yourself,” Gavin tells him. “You’re not a _type,_ you son of a bitch. There’s not a single living thing with a pulse that would be upset to see you show up. Too bad you ruin it for yourself the moment you open your mouth.”

“Well, that’s discouraging,” says Nines.

“The secret is,” says Gavin, “you have to make people feel wanted. Like they’re important.” His fingers brush against a wet patch at the head of his cock, and his breath hitches, unbidden. “Like I would— do things just for them.”

When Nines speaks again, it’s with such painstaking indifference that Gavin can’t help but notice the deliberation that goes into it.

“Maybe,” says Nines, “take a bullet for them.”

“Not what I meant,” says Gavin. He would be more peeved about the turn in the conversation, except he’s thinking about that meticulous veneer of disinterest in Nines’s voice. _Is this the way your detachment has always sounded?_ wonders Gavin. _You run as fast as you can to keep your distance— for what?_

“From these clients,” says Nines, “do you field a lot of— unorthodox requests?”

“Now you’re getting it,” says Gavin. “That’s where the big bucks are. Dismemberment, evisceration, there’s some grisly stuff that only androids can even get close to providing. I don’t do that shit, though. Had to ban some people that wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

“Not worth the money?” asks Nines.

“No,” says Gavin. He’s hard enough that he’s riding the edge of discomfort, straining to a sweet ache against his underwear. “I like— knowing that I only have to give what I want to,” he continues, freer with his disclosure than he would be otherwise, now that the shiver is building in him. “No one gets to decide for me. No one even— gets to touch me. All they can do is watch. I like that.”

“Must be different,” says Nines, “from the way it was before.”

There it is again, his scrupulous reserve. “Stop profiling me,” Gavin snaps. “Jesus Christ, it’s like you’re trying to kill the mood on purpose. Are you going to let me do the show, or are you going to interview me about Landau? We can’t do both.”

Nines, wisely, shuts up. The trouble is that he’s not wrong. There was always something a little desperate and overdetermined in Gavin’s enthusiasm for this work, the way that running away from something still meant you were letting it chart your course. _This has nothing to do with him,_ the echo, _him,_ and _him,_ Desmond Landau’s ghost, still there in the rafters. _I can’t forget you if I’m spending all my time trying to forget you._

Anxious to shake himself out of it, Gavin hooks his thumbs in his waistband. Hips lifted halfway to enough, he pauses; on his laptop display, Nines is so motionless that he may as well be a screenshot of himself.

“This is where you’re supposed to stop me,” says Gavin.

Resting easy in the crook of his palm, Nines’s head inclines in question.

“Why would I do that?” he asks.

Gavin swallows, and tugs his underwear down before he can second-guess himself. _Here you go, then._ His cock, filled to half-hard, flushed and beading wet, knocks against the inside of his thigh. A smear of precome against skin, drying cool in the air. Bare to the waist, Gavin stares back at Nines, unwilling to back down.

Modesty doesn’t come into it. Every inch of his body, someone soldered and snapped together on the production line. He’s been taken apart and twisted open, scooped out hollow and wrenched back together; even long before he became used to the heat of hundreds of nameless eyes on him, the form of his hull had never seemed a private thing.

So it can’t be shyness that prickles at him, under Nines’s impassive gaze. That’s laughable — what a luxury, to be born to a body that you could withhold — but the silence unnerves him nonetheless. And: some of the indignation, if Gavin is honest, is also a matter of pride. _People pay for this,_ he thinks, wounded despite himself. _If you let yourself, you would like it._

_—me. You would like—_

The thought too raw to dwell on, Gavin trails his fingers across the span of his stomach, hiking his undershirt up an inch. “What do you think?” he murmurs, a bid at some kind of seduction. “Worth your money?”

“Too early to tell,” says Nines.

“God,” says Gavin, “you motherfucker. You cold fucking fish.”

He rolls onto his side to clatter around in the bedside drawer, fishing out what he needs — a sleek, dark vibrator, low-tech but invariably effective — a tube of lubricant — a faded t-shirt in tatters from the wash, because something about the messy delinquency of a shirt standing in for a towel really seemed to do it for his clientele. Not that Nines would go for what they went for, if he’d go for any of it.

Everything gets tossed on the bed next to him. “It’s a miracle,” Gavin continues to complain as he squeezes gel out onto his cupped hand, “that you even had anyone to break up with you in the first place. What were you doing _dating,_ anyway? You? _Dating?”_

“I wasn’t aware I was banned from it,” says Nines.

“Just doesn’t suit you,” says Gavin. “You, being in a situation to— I mean, it’s ridiculous. Who dumps _you?_ In favor of _what?”_

“Which part are you objecting to,” says Nines, “the dating or the breaking up?”

“Both,” says Gavin. He can’t fathom either end of the equation; what kind of a person did it take to turn Nines so— _pedestrian,_ like cutting down a redwood, or naming a hurricane? And on the other side of it, to have that in your hands and still to think, somehow, _I want something else._

“My apologies,” says Nines. “I’ll bring you a permission slip to sign, next time around.”

Gavin flips him off with a gel-drenched middle finger, before he reaches down between his legs and presses it inside himself. One knuckle, a second. He exhales slowly.

It seems pointless — or dishonest, perhaps — to play it up the way he would for his sessions. Falling apart at the barest touch. But underneath all his crossed wires, there’s a simple, animal quality to his taste for this work: a guileless vanity, the thrill of showing himself off. That part of him lights up, alive and well, no matter how dour the reception from Nines.

When Gavin asks, “What were you looking to get out of it?” the tamped-down tremor in his voice is real.

Nines takes his time with the answer. “Most actions we take,” he says, finally, “are structured by parameters that govern behavior. Android or human, what one does is delimited by what one considers doable. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that— dating seemed like the sort of thing that one does.”

 _Parameters._ Gavin bites at his lip as he adds a second finger, working himself open bit by bit. Stroking inside himself, coaxing his library of subroutines into quickness. The tenor of Nines’s explanation was one that Gavin recognized; it boiled down to an uncertainty about boundaries, searching for rules that could give shape to the unmanageable possibility of the world. Left to your own devices, no longer told what to do.

“How did you deviate?” asks Gavin. “What happened?”

“Nothing happened,” says Nines. “Or, rather, the Revolution happened. Jericho lobbied hard to make deviancy a precondition of activation for all androids, and the resulting federal mandate specified that this also applied retroactively to all units currently in operation. Critical firmware upgrade, CyberLife called it.”

“A downloadable free will patch.” Gavin laughs, the sound shaky around the edges. The crook of his fingertips catches against his entrance as he draws them free, and he shudders at the feeling, the room blinking in and out with the flutter of his eyelids. Still, he can’t resist a taunt where it’s due: “Too bad they couldn’t bundle a personality into the package for you.”

“—Do I have to keep talking about myself?” asks Nines.

“What else would you do,” Gavin scoffs. “Just sit there and stare at me?”

“Yes,” says Nines.

Clean and candid as a knife. Just that: _yes._ Gavin falters in place, instantly feverish under his skin. Almost afraid of what he might find, he glances up at his monitor, where Nines is looking back at him; where Nines hasn’t _stopped_ looking at him, not for a second, since the moment he arrived. Nines, steady and ruthless in his attention, all of him missile-keen, honed in on Gavin. His eyes—

At the sudden unbearable force of the _want_ Gavin recognizes there, something like lightning crashes through him. He clenches around his own fingers without meaning to, pulsing with need, a surprised little noise spilling out of him. Nines doesn’t react, but— _that’s not your tell,_ thinks Gavin. _You don’t move much, and you say less. It’s only the weight in your eyes that gives you away._

_That lets me know you want—_

“Okay,” mutters Gavin, “fuck,” fumbling as he slicks up the vibrator with another palmful of gel. He could, on the one hand, do what he always does. Tease himself until he can barely see straight, the tightrope buzz of the not-quite-enough that sways him on the delicious brink. But on the other hand— god, if he doesn’t _ache_ for something to fill him up, frantically kindled at the sight of Nines, watching and waiting like a jungle cat.

He’s gotten too used to the slack rest of his body after hours on the edge. It’s not often that he guides a toy inside himself and feels the throb of it stretching him open; either he’s missed it — or he’s eager enough now that everything is a species of pleasure to him — but he’s rock-hard by the time it’s fully seated in him, the head of his cock twitching against his abdomen.

He has to grit his teeth and ride it out for a bit, until the immediate threat of the crest passes. When he breathes out at last, a long unsteady sigh, he’s more parched than he expects to be. It’s possible that he might not have been entirely quiet, perhaps.

“You seem to be enjoying yourself,” says Nines.

“Just wait,” says Gavin. “I’m only getting started.”

Gripping the end of the vibrator, he draws it halfway out before he sinks it back inside himself, relishing the tight slide of its length against his walls. Every inch of it, parting the silk clutch of muscle. His toes curl against the mattress as he fucks himself in long, even thrusts, panting shallowly, grinding his ass back into the strokes.

A wild thought occurs to him. The impulse to cross a line. It’s absurd that there would be any more lines left to cross, when he’s already stripped up to the waist and spread open in front of the camera, each bead of sweat sharply distinct in 4K UHD. _But what if I dragged you into it,_ thinks Gavin, and can’t get it out of his head. _What would you do then?_

He angles the vibrator up a touch, shifting its blunt tip towards the electric spot inside him. That’s courtesy of the humanization department at CyberLife, doubtless a battalion of perverts, with their lovingly crafted arsenal of artificial sex organs. Gavin is intimately acquainted with himself, to say the least — when he means to hit his prostate, he’ll hit his fucking prostate, thank you — and if he wants to take the moment to try to catch Nines off-balance, he’ll very well do that, too.

With a twist of the wrist, Gavin grazes the head of the toy against his cluster of nerves. In the hot wash of sensation that it spreads through him, full as a drop of ink in water, he curves his back off the bed and digs his nails into the sheets.

 _“—Nines,”_ he gasps, softly.

The jolt of arousal that accompanies it, however, isn’t part of Gavin’s plan. Something about this is more reckless than he’d been prepared for; it was only meant to prod at Nines’s reticence, see if he could be goaded into any reaction at all, but Gavin’s own stubborn knots come unraveled at the sound of Nines’s name in his mouth. Too intimate by half.

At least it does what it’s meant to. Nines’s throat bobs in a dry swallow, and he doesn’t manage to wholly mask the strain in his voice when he asks, “Is that really necessary?”

 _I’ve got you,_ thinks Gavin. All this push-and-pull with Nines, nipping at his heels, testing his patience— it’s worth it for these rare moments when his shell cracks loose. Under pressure, Nines’s edges bend and turn him to a shape more interesting, _organic,_ like a can crumpled in a fist. Not that he isn’t beautiful at his unforgiving worst — _that’s how they made you, to look good with blood on your hands_ — but these stutters are precious for being so fleeting, prized glimpses into what Nines keeps guarded away. _You’re not so bad. Maybe if I reached out and touched you, I could come away without cutting myself._

“Did you think,” says Gavin, “this was going to be impersonal?” He circles his thumb around the rim of the vibrator, until he finds the bump of its button underneath the silicone. Bracing himself, he switches it on, and still has to bite down on a startled moan— the mechanical whirr of its hardness inside him sets him alight, crackles into fireworks up his spine, sparks shooting into his limbs, down to his fingertips. “Did you, ah,” he continues, over the background hum, “assume this was— going to, _ah,_ going to be—”

“You don’t have to keep roasting me if it’s too much,” says Nines.

He sounds so fucking _fond_ that Gavin spasms inside with want, the vibrator jerking and skimming the swell of his prostate again, tearing another gasp from him. “Then stop pretending you — ah, _god_ — don’t know what—,” though he gives up on the rest of the sentence as the toy writhes deeper into him, wiping his head blank. He tries one more time when he can, mustering all the focus he’s able to scrape up. “I know you— come watch, sometimes,” he says.

“Official business,” murmurs Nines. “Just keeping an eye on you.”

All the air in Gavin’s lungs burns so hot, he half expects smoke to drift from his parted lips. Pinned in place like a butterfly by the hold of Nines’s gaze, he can’t seem to look away— dazedly, Gavin traces the outline of Nines’s shoulders with his eyes, the broad span of his body in black. Out of his customary button-downs, he cuts a figure that’s no less intimidating for leaning casual. The only difference is the unspoken intent behind the intimidation, the inkling of what he might do to the obstacles in his path. His pedantry, outsized as it is, never really hid the physical ferocity he’s capable of; but like this, solid in the cling of his turtleneck, he’s an ode to brutality.

 _Less like he would sue you,_ thinks Gavin. _More like he would crush you._

“Nines,” he calls, breathy and sweet, bolder now that he knows he’s getting through. “God— ah, _Nines_ —”

He thinks he hears the catch of a jagged inhale from Nines, but he can’t be sure. Somewhere outside the frame of the camera, maybe Nines is fighting to compose himself, white-knuckled around his armrest. _Did I get you harder than a W-2, like I said I would?_ Gavin shakily rucks up his undershirt in something like a trance, sliding his hand in underneath to palm the curves of his chest, brushing across his peaked nipples. Even the little enough of that makes him go tight around the vibrator, and dizzy with the high of Nines’s attention, Gavin pleads, _Nines, ah, there,_ like they’re Nines’s hands on him, kneading him into shape.

Gavin thinks of Nines, hard in his neat pressed slacks. _If I were there in your rented room —_ on his knees in front of Nines’s chair, bracketed between his legs — mouthing at the shape of his bulge through the layers of fabric, teeth closing around his zipper pull. The metal a cold and delicate pill on the tip of his tongue — the weighty heft of Nines’s cock, cradled in his hands — taking that thickness into his mouth until the heat spills down his throat, lips wrapped around _him,_ Nines, and Nines’s hand coming to thread through his hair, voice pitched low when he says—

— _Gavin,_ _you did good._

“—Shit,” he manages, “fuck, _ah—,”_ open-mouthed and helpless, the thought of it nearly tipping him over the edge. He only manages to pull himself back from it through sheer obstinacy, his cock jumping in anticipation, a rivulet of precome trickling into the grooves of his abdomen.

Liking what he does is one thing, but he’s never found himself wishing before that a stream could go on longer. While this febrile spell still hangs over them, they’re both complicit in the madness of the moment; Gavin doesn’t know what they’ll be on the other side of it, only that when it’s over — like the stroke of midnight that undoes the glamor — nothing will look the way that it does now.

 _Slow down, hold on,_ he begs himself, desperate with the impending loss. _Just a little longer._ But Nines looks at him through the screen with a hunger that verges on something predatory, lips slightly parted like he’s about to tell Gavin something, _or to open wide and swallow me whole,_ and either possibility only stokes the flame hotter.

“Wait,” Gavin stammers out loud, to no one in particular, “I can’t—”

He scrabbles for the switch to the vibrator to give himself a break, but his fingertips keep slipping against the silicone, slick with gel. He’s shaking too hard to get a good grip, a trembling wreck on the bedsheets — only succeeding in accidentally nudging the toy further into himself and yelping at the core-deep rumble of it — and then, just to put something in between him and Nines, unable to tear himself away otherwise, he throws a forearm over his eyes and buries his face in the crook of his elbow.

“Gavin, stop,” says Nines, sharply. _“Look at me.”_

The savage urgency in his voice, a gold-tipped spear, shatters Gavin. _Yes,_ he thinks in a hazy storm of static, before he’s drawing taut and coming with a strangled moan, his head wrenched back and his throat bare, torso jerking clean off the bed. _Yes, anything._ In the clench of his muscles in climax, the vibrator buzzes against his prostate until the lights in his head start to blur, his vision whiting out in patches. _Whatever you want from me._

At last, with a final weak spurt, his spent cock dips its head and some of the tension seeps out of his limbs. It always takes him a while to regain system equilibrium, an attendant inefficiency of having had most of his internal organs replaced. With the ringing in his ears and the aftershocks ricocheting through him, Gavin is barely there enough to swat the vibrator off, just as its insistent throbbing starts to be too much.

All he can hear is the rush of his own blood. Shivering and struggling for breath, he doesn’t realize that Nines is speaking to him until the room returns in fragments.

“—vin,” says Nines. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m— I’m fine,” groans Gavin. “Piece of shit aftermarket parts.”

He reaches down to draw the vibrator out of himself. His sensitivity settings are, as it turns out, yet to stabilize; at the unexpected stab of pleasure the movement gives him, Gavin has to sink his teeth into the meat of his hand to stifle a whine.

“Is it still aftermarket,” he continues, sluggishly wiping his palm on the scrap of t-shirt, “if CyberLife made it? Anyway, they didn’t have any GV models in production, the second time I came in for repairs. Had to make do with what they had, so I— ended up with a lot of performance bottlenecks.”

Nines doesn’t say anything.

“My pipes don’t fit right,” Gavin explains.

“I knew what you meant,” says Nines.

Dabbing at the mess of his stomach, Gavin feels something thick and unspeakable lodged in his poorly fitted pipes. Even after he’s cleaned up and the beating of his pump is a steady swish again — only a little quicker than it ever is at rest — he carries on fiddling with the frayed hem of the shirt, nervous somehow to look back up at Nines. _Why, when the dirty work is done?_ he chides himself. _What’s there left to be nervous about?_

Gavin pushes off the bed to sit up, legs crossed under him. Making any more of an effort to cover himself up seems too prudish an acknowledgement of the situation, but he doesn’t know how else to ease them back down to the ground, or what Nines expects from him. Where Nines thinks they’ll go from here.

He clears his throat. “Since you’ve already paid,” he says, “you might as well stay until the hour runs out.”

When Gavin finally forces himself to glance up at the screen, Nines is looking — for the first time — somewhere past the frame of his camera. He appears to consider Gavin’s suggestion, then makes a thoughtful sound.

“Well,” he says, “the hour did run out.”

To one side of Gavin’s desk, his tablet with its timer, _00:00:00_ blinking red. Gavin stares at it in blank confusion, trying to make sense of the numbers.

“Did it?” he asks.

“It seems so,” says Nines.

His eyes flicker back to Gavin. There’s a delicate tug of something around the corners of his mouth, like a pause of breath before a word takes shape. Even without his preconstruction to paint the picture for him, Gavin’s hunch for these things is rarely wrong; he knows that Nines isn’t going to say anything, in the end.

Nines always gives him less than he hopes for, but this time, being left a little wanting doesn’t feel like the betrayal that it did before. _You work your way towards it, and I’ll work mine,_ he thinks. _Whoever gets there first waits in the middle._

“I’ll bill you for the overtime,” says Gavin.


	3. Chapter 3

## 7.

The next time Gavin is supposed to see Nines, he doesn’t. A sore unattended thumb in the middle of the Central Station lobby, Gavin shoves his hands in his pockets and tries distracting himself with the drone of the television set in the corner, the quotidian shuffle of beat cops headed out for patrol. He doesn’t recognize anyone, but the rhythm of it hasn’t changed much.

It’s not like Nines to be late. Gavin wouldn’t have thought him physically capable of it, but of course, Nines is physically capable of most anything. A spin on the age-old paradox: _Can CyberLife make an android so advanced that he could lapse in all the ways that a vastly inferior machine would?_

Impatient with unease, Gavin drags himself to the reception desk and clears his throat. “Hey,” he says. “I’m— waiting for someone.”

The ST300 looks at the flickering LED at his temple. Then — when she realizes that Gavin isn’t going to use the comm line to provide his credentials or tell her any further details — a wisp of curiosity flits across her face before her professionalism gets the better of her.

“I can send along a message,” she says. “Who is it for?”

“Special Agent RK900,” he says. “He said he’d meet me in the lobby.”

It takes her only a fraction of a second to check the personnel log. “Agent Nines is here,” she says. “He’s currently—”

This part of it is, apparently, a trickier answer to come by; her LED glimmers yellow as she runs through the ID card swipes, tracks biometric signatures across the station floor. Even for all that, it seems to Gavin that her hesitation is a beat too long to be purely utilitarian in nature.

“Currently what?” he asks.

“Occupied,” she says. That’s all she divulges out loud, but she blinks serenely and slips an addendum into the confidence of the comm line:

_arguing_

_—Arguing? Nines?_ Gavin has a barrage of follow-up questions for her, _arguing about what, arguing with whom, arguing where,_ but there’s a bustle near the security divider and some human he’s never seen before is calling his name like she’s looking for a lost child in a department store.

“Gavin?” she’s asking from the other side of the gate, cap tucked under her arm, rummaging in her uniform pockets. “Are you Gavin? Nines told me to come get you.”

“Please don’t run his errands for him,” says Gavin. “His ego is a problem as it is.”

“Okay, I see you know him well,” she says. Leaning out past the gate, she tells the ST300, “I got it from here, thanks,” and receives a nod in return. A few more seconds of patting herself down, then she says: “False alarm, Sam, I don’t got it from here. I can’t find my lanyard, can you buzz him in? Sorry.”

“It’s at your desk, Officer Chen,” says Sam, and the divider swings open.

“Thanks,” Gavin tells her as he goes.

“A gem, wouldn’t get a thing done without her. You have to call me Tina, though,” says Tina. “Nines says you’ve been around the station before— what happened, you get yourself into trouble?”

“Something like that,” he says. “Where’s Nines?”

“Conference room,” she says. “He’s ironing out some details.”

Vague as it can get. Gavin has the same questions for Tina that he did for Sam; but then they step into the hideous open floor plan of the bullpen and it jostles the breath from him, to see it exactly the way he left it. Three years out, every filing cabinet and every wire-frame trash can, just as he remembers. _Like I’ve been here all along. Like I could have belonged here._

In his fishbowl office, enshrined like a shark in formaldehyde— Fowler, glaring daggers at whatever’s on his screen. Gavin stills to a stop, until Tina notices and turns to collect him.

“What’s up?” she asks.

“Can I say hello to the Captain?” asks Gavin. “For old times’ sake.”

“Oh, sure,” says Tina. “He’s in a mood, but I guess he’s always in a mood. I’ll go grab my lanyard and come back.”

It’s possible that her permission doesn’t exactly entail Gavin stomping up the stairs and shoving Fowler’s door open with his foot, but she seems like a lenient chaperone and it’s always easier to badger someone into forgiveness after the fact. Fowler looks up from behind his desk, and the disgruntlement on his face settles into lines of resigned endurance.

“Gavin,” he says.

“Captain Jeffrey fucking Fowler,” says Gavin. “Should have known you couldn’t get rid of me that easily.”

“Yes, well,” says Fowler, “your exhausting bluster aside, thank you for coming in today. I know this is a lot to ask of you.”

“Maybe you’ll owe me one,” says Gavin, “forever. I’ll just hold it over you for the rest of time.”

“That’s unlikely,” says Fowler, peering into his coffee mug only to find it empty. “Anyway, I hope you understand that these are— formalities, more than anything else. We’ve got protocols to follow, investigative avenues we have to exhaust before we can move on. Don’t take it too personally.”

“What?” asks Gavin, bewildered. “Take what personally? What’s personal about it?”

“—Wait,” says Fowler, “why are you here?”

“To flip Boots,” says Gavin. “Are you senile or something?”

Fowler stares up at him, then sighs and wearily rubs the bridge of his nose. “Shit,” he groans. “Nines is going to chew my fucking ear off. Chen didn’t tell you about the arm yet?”

The Chen in question comes rushing up to the office, furiously gesturing _cut, cut_ at her newly lanyard-festooned neck. She presses her hand to the outside wall to look back and forth between Gavin’s puzzlement and Fowler’s despondency.

“Sir,” she says, faintly muted through glass, “you shouldn’t tell Gavin about the arm.”

“Thank you, Chen,” mutters Fowler.

“What _arm?”_ demands Gavin.

“Actually, Agent Nines wanted to tell you himself,” says Tina. She throws Fowler a hasty salute as she maneuvers Gavin out of the office. “I don’t know all the details of it,” she continues as they head towards the conference room, “just that— Connor and Lieutenant Anderson need you for something to do with your arm. But since you’re here today to help out with Butacavoli, Nines didn’t think it would be fair to spring that on you all of a sudden. He’s been _livid_ since he heard about it.”

“Is Boots not coming in?” asks Gavin. “Am I not doing that?”

“He’ll be here, but— you should talk to Nines about it,” says Tina. “He’s spent the last hour laying into Hank and Connor, so I gather he might have some strong opinions.”

She raps on the door to the conference room; there’s enough soundproofing that the precise contours of whatever laying into is occurring inside don’t make it out, but the blurry hubbub of disagreement becomes apparent in absentia when the knock abruptly silences it. After a long second, the door swings open. It’s Nines.

“Gavin,” he says, LED ruddy with vexation.

“What’s going on?” asks Gavin. “What’s this about my arm?”

“It’s—” begins Nines, then asks over his shoulder: “Can we have the room for a minute?”

“Yeah,” says Hank. “Sure.”

Their armfuls of tablets and paper dossiers and coffee mugs gathered up, Hank and Connor slip out of the room past Nines, unbudging in the doorway. They glance towards Gavin as they leave, a flash of something like sympathy passing over Connor’s face. On Hank, it looks a lot like guilt.

“Thank you,” Nines tells Tina.

“I’ll be around,” she says, and snicks the door closed.

Nines gestures towards a chair. It feels ludicrous to sit across from him, like they’re a pair of lawyers trying to negotiate a settlement, so Gavin takes a seat at the corner of the table instead. Too frayed in his ire, Nines doesn’t seem to notice that he’s been herded; he falls into the chair next to Gavin’s, head tipped to lean against the backrest, his arms crossed.

He snaps to composure in a moment or two, straightening like a jackknife with his hands steepled in front of him.

“The medical examiner called,” he says. “They identified the pattern injury on Landau’s skull.”

“Couldn’t have been easy,” says Gavin. “Underneath what the Presas tore up? Jesus. I guess that’s why it took them this long to come up with a match. What did that son of a bitch in, anyway?”

“Knuckles,” says Nines. “Consistent with parts produced for the GV500 model line.”

_Connor and Lieutenant Anderson need you for something to do with your arm._

“—Knuckles,” says Gavin, numbly. “Produced for— right, okay. I get it now.”

The first lucid thought that comes to him is: _Well, I tick a lot of boxes on the flight risk checklist. It makes sense, why they couldn’t let me know about this ahead of time._

“So— what does that mean?” asks Gavin. “Am I a suspect?”

“No,” says Nines, firm as trodden ground. “Nothing changes. You’re fine. The DPD will need to borrow your arm to get the access log data off of it, but that should be straightforward enough. That will serve as your alibi for the window of the murder, which will get them off your back for good, then we can all put this farcical interlude behind us.”

“You don’t know it’s a farcical interlude,” Gavin points out. “Yet.”

“Stop that,” snaps Nines. “Are you _trying_ to make this worse?”

“I’m just saying,” continues Gavin, “you seem awfully sure that I had nothing to do with the crime, when my knuckle prints were found all over a bashed-in skull.”

“They weren’t yours,” says Nines, exasperated by this contrarian pushback. “Eventually, Hank and Connor will arrive at who put the knuckle prints there, but even they can’t possibly think it was you. They just have to go through these motions before they’re licensed to admit as much.”

This is a fair and measured assessment of DPD procedure, coming from someone who has just spent an hour denouncing it at the top of his lungs. “Which is it?” asks Gavin. “You get why they have to do it, or you think they’re assholes for doing it? Make up your mind.”

“I don’t begrudge them their process,” says Nines. “But _you—_ I brought you in here to talk to Butacavoli. That’s why you’re here. If I’d known about this call from the ME, I wouldn’t have set up the interview for today, like I—” He searches for the right words to turn against himself. “Like I lured you into some kind of _trap,_ by saying you’d be—”

“Bullshit, lay off it,” interrupts Gavin. “The arm’s a DPD thing, Boots is a— you thing. A Fed thing. That’s not a bait-and-switch.”

“You don’t have to do the interview today,” says Nines. “They’ll have your arm down at the analytics lab for hours, you do know that? You won’t get it back before Boots arrives.”

“Good thing I don’t need both arms to talk,” says Gavin. “I want to do it, come on. Let me be useful.”

The wheedling is meant to be a little insouciant, but Nines’s face clouds over when he hears it. _Something like,_ thinks Gavin, _when he asked me why I ran into Frankie’s._ The same awful unwanted answer.

When he finally speaks, Nines’s voice — flat as a razor’s edge — is filed to a terseness that can only come of effort. “Do you not remember what happened to you,” he asks, “the last time you wanted to be useful?”

 _Was that what made you angry?_ The shell of his body cleft open, a chasm running blue as a pageant sash. The pain, a thunderbolt. _No one else would have done this for you._ But — as precious little as Landau had ever done for him, in that moment, Gavin thought — _no one else had done that much for me, either._ The warmth of the hand in his hair.How else was he supposed to pay it back, that tattered scrap of kindness, when all he had to his name was the blood in his veins?

_And for you, who waited— how else if not with this?_

There’s a knock on the door. “Agent,” says Connor.

“One second,” Nines calls back. Then, to Gavin: “All right. Here’s what will happen. Only Hank and Connor are authorized to be present during the disengagement process; they do have a search warrant for the access log data, but you don’t have to tell them anything you don’t want to. I need to go have a word with Fowler, but will return in time to accompany you to the interrogation room for the Butacavoli interview.”

“Why can’t you be here?” asks Gavin. “There’s nothing under my shirt you haven’t seen before, you know.”

The muscles at the base of Nines’s jaw twitch, but not in anger, exactly. He bites down on something and shakes his head, giving up on whatever was going to come next in his litany of tedium.

“—You’re a menace,” he says. “It’s a jurisdiction issue. Since the homicide investigation does not, technically, belong under the purview of Operation Electric Slide—”

“Wait, hold on,” Gavin cuts in, delighted at the hint of embarrassment in Nines’s hurried disclosure. “That’s what your case is called? Operation Electric Slide? What the fuck, were you just never going to tell me that?”

“I don’t see how it’s relevant,” protests Nines. “I didn’t—”

 _“Nines,”_ says Connor.

“I didn’t name it,” says Nines, extricating himself from the chair, straightening his shirt, making an absurd ordeal out of the act of standing up. Gavin figures it’s because he’s mortified about _Operation Electric Slide,_ but then Nines draws a deep breath he doesn’t need and says, “—Gavin,” and it’s not about the case at all.

“It’s fine,” says Gavin. “Really.”

He leaves the rest of it unsaid: _You can take anything you want from me._

Hank steps aside to let Nines by, empty evidence bag crumpled up in his hands like he wants to will it into disappearing. Connor, too, has decency enough to look uncomfortable with this turn in their investigation; he’s the one that takes the seat next to Gavin, in the end.

“Good move,” says Gavin. “It’s much less resonant of a hate crime when an android mutilates another android.”

Hank cringes.

“That’s a joke,” says Gavin. “It’s funny because it’s true.”

“You have the right to know the particulars of what this procedure entails,” says Connor. “I’ll give you the rundown, and you can sign here to acknowledge that you’ve been provided with the necessary information.”

Sliding a tablet over to Gavin, he continues: “Each constituent component of the android body retains a local record of transmissions exchanged with the processing unit. Essentially, your arm is keeping a tally of what it did and when. This was originally used by CyberLife to improve durability for androids tasked with specialized motor functions. Reducing risk of repetitive stress injuries, you could say.”

“So looking through that,” says Gavin, “verifies whether my arm was attached to me at any given point in time.”

“Correct,” says Connor. “This record — the access log data — can be cross-referenced with the geolocation data stored on the CyberLife end, which tracks where your processing unit is at any given point in time. Placed in conjunction, these two data points establish an alibi for you _and_ your arm, by demonstrating that neither was near the scene of the crime at the time of incident.”

“Forensics got so fucking weird in the last decade,” mutters Hank.

“But for reasons of client privacy, CyberLife geolocation data is neither readily accessible nor transparent,” says Connor. “It’s somewhat similar to pinging a cell phone, but on the CyberLife proprietary communications matrix rather than on a cellular network. As such, all our requests will have to clear CyberLife corporate before we can conclusively rule out your involvement.”

“Are you serious?” asks Gavin. “You have to shank the CyberLife legal team to get to this data?”

“They’re very invested in remaining circumspect about what they track and how,” says Connor. “Jericho has been trying to reframe that debate as an issue of civil liberties, so— it may take some time until the dust settles.”

“And until that happens, what?” asks Gavin. “You keep me under house arrest?”

“Of course not,” answers Connor, “we can hardly do that without probable cause,” but he’s looking at the tabletop instead as he says it.

One way or another, the DPD is going to put eyes on him, then. Gavin doesn’t share Nines’s misgivings about all this, doesn’t feel like he’s been hoodwinked into doing anything he wouldn’t have agreed to anyway, but _this_ — the furtive ignominy of suspicion, clinging to him like a film of grime — 

_And what about Nines,_ he wants to ask. _What happens to the investigative trips? When we went down to the docks— he needed me in there, did you know that? How do you expect me to be of any use to him, cooped up at home? What about Nines?_

None of that is Connor’s mess to clean up. Gavin digs the stylus tip into the dotted line on the tablet and writes, _GV500 #416 551 885._

“You should know,” he says, pulling his shirt up over his head, “people usually pay for this part.”

“If you could retract the skin up to your shoulder, please,” says Connor.

Gavin might be comfortable in his skin, but he’s exceedingly discomfited _out_ of it; _that’s the sort of thing that happens when you attend one too many open-casket funerals for yourself_. What’s there to see, other than the pale reminder of what he’ll look like when he’s dead again? But when Hank leans forward with sudden interest, his hand coming to grip around Gavin’s elbow, the touch startles Gavin back to attention.

“Hang on,” Hank says to Connor, “look at this.”

Gavin does, too, trailing after the coarse pad of Hank’s forefinger. Just above the hinge where his right elbow bends into his upper arm, engraved on the hull: _GJ500,_ he reads.

“—Have you always had this arm?” asks Connor.

“I didn’t know I had it,” says Gavin, baffled by the imprint of someone else’s name on his bones. “But why would CyberLife produce— no, that’s not it, that’s not what they did. It must have been during the reconstruction,” he explains, as the pieces start to fall into place. “First or second shutdown, I don’t know for sure, but if they weren’t able to find a GV part for ready replacement— second time, probably. Three years ago. What do GJ models do?”

“Private security,” says Connor. “This isn’t just a cosmetic alteration, either. It really is a GJ500 arm.”

“They fit you up with a different arm from some other model line?” asks Hank. “And didn’t even tell you about it before they discharged you?”

“You talk to your couch about the upholstery?” counters Gavin. “It works well enough, which is more than you can say for the other replacement parts they had to source.” Then — underneath the roil of his abiding hostility towards CyberLife — something clicks. “These GJ500 arms,” he says, “do their knuckles—”

“Completely different,” says Connor. “Nothing like the GV500 design.”

Hank’s face twists into a smile. “If it hadn’t been for those cheap-ass corner-cutting bastards,” he says.

“We’ll still have to bring your arm down to the analytics lab,” Connor tells Gavin. “It’ll take the same amount of time to pull the access log. But since the pattern injury isn’t a match, all that needs to be done with the data is to verify that this arm remained connected to you for the relevant 48 hours.”

“No knife fight with CyberLife lawyers?” asks Gavin.

“That might still happen just for the thrill of it,” says Connor, “but it won’t be related to your case, no. You’ll be cleared as soon as we get the arm back to you in a few hours.”

“The larger question is,” says Hank, “who’s the GV500 that the arm belongs to? How’d another GV500 get mixed up in all of this?”

“I wouldn’t be so sure that there _is_ another GV500 involved,” says Connor, pensive. “Hank, I’ll fill you in on it later, but— something has been bothering me about the impact on the wound site.” Then, to Gavin: “For now, we’ll collect the arm and run the analytics.”

Gavin tries to hold still as Connor locates the release latch underneath the plating of his shoulder; just a few well-placed points of pressure and the whole arm snaps loose, easy as ripping out the seams in something hastily sewn together. _We’re all modular contraptions, in the end._ Connor lifts the joint out of its socket, the armhole of Gavin’s undershirt a forlorn cavity, and drops the limb into the open mouth of Hank’s evidence bag. With the seal pressed closed **,** packed in plastic, it looks like the world’s least appetizing ham hock.

“I can tell Nines, right?” asks Gavin, struggling back into his tee, more of an ordeal than he expected without his right hand. “That this won’t get in the way of anything. I’m good to go after today?”

“Yes, Agent Nines is entitled to that information,” says Connor.

From where he’s scrawling the date and item description onto the evidence bag label — _GV500 arm component (replacement peripheral)_ — Hank huffs without looking up, a reproachful sound.

“What?” asks Gavin.

“This whole— _Agent Nines_ thing,” says Hank. “Wouldn’t know it from the way you go on,but last I checked, he was still FBI. Wasn’t it a Fed that got you shut down, the second time around?”

“Is this because of the jurisdiction shit?” asks Gavin. “Just settle it like everyone else does, get your cocks out and see how far you can piss. What do you care?”

“I’ve been here thirty years, I know how this goes,” says Hank. He clicks the pen cap closed like a punctuation mark, leaning back in his chair. “Happens to humans, too. Happens to animals. You go a long enough while without anyone half-decent around you, and it starves you for kindness, eventually. You get so desperate that when the first fucking passable thing comes your way, it looks like the best thing you’ve ever seen. How would you know the difference? You’re starving. You’re ready to bend over backwards at the slightest hint of—”

“Right,” scoffs Gavin, “because my problem is that I’m too _agreeable.”_

“No, you’re genuinely aggravating,” says Hank. “But Nines is— look, I’m not saying he’s hatching up some nefarious plot, or that he’s recruiting you for his P90X cult, or whatever. What I’m saying is that there’s no way he didn’t figure out, within ten minutes of meeting you, exactly what you lack and how badly you need it. He knows how to get what he wants from you.”

“—It’s not like that,” mumbles Gavin. He looks towards Connor in petition, as though Connor might have at hand some clairvoyant insight into the RK-series mindset that would absolve Nines of these aspersions.

Instead, Connor just says, “Agent Nines is extremely capable,” and it hangs in the air like a threat.

 _It’s not like that_ , thinks Gavin, again. _Nines isn’t like that._ But it’s the same call for caution that lay coiled at the heart of Nines’s own question: _Do you not remember what happened to you, the last time you wanted to be useful?_ The last time Gavin put himself in someone else’s hands, Desmond Landau slit his throat and threw him to the sharks like a bucketful of chum.

 _And didn’t that feel right?_ he hears Landau ask, the scent of leather and ink. _Didn’t you feel useful?_

“If Nines is so capable,” says Gavin, “what could he possibly want from me? Think about it. What’s he made of, I don’t know, but I bet a bullet wouldn’t even fucking nick him.”

“He _did_ absorb a pipe bomb blast that ripped a trailer inside out,” says Connor.

Gavin pounces on it, eager for any chance to redirect the scrutiny of their solicitude. “See,” he says, “whole lot of good I would do him. What’s that story, anyway? A pipe bomb? All I’ve ever seen him do is make phone calls.”

“You remember the Statehouse Bombing from a few years back,” says Connor. “Agent Nines was assigned to work it as a counterterrorism case, which is what initially brought him to the Michigan field office. He found a compression spring buried in the middle of the lawn, identified it as belonging to a 1970s kitchen timer made in East Germany, tracked the purchase down to the residence of the bomber, who panicked and detonated an in-progress explosive device inside the trailer. Agent Nines was, as I hear it, superficially singed.”

“And then?” asks Gavin. “He liked Michigan so much he never left?”

“He’s following the ice money,” says Hank. “That Statehouse Bomber took some pages straight out of the McVeigh playbook, had one foot in the Michigan Militia. And who funds these fucking backwater militias all over the goddamn country? Who likes to synthesize Schedule I narcotics on unregulated territory patrolled by anti-government extremists?”

“Which is how he made his way to Landau,” says Connor. “Though I’m sure the extensive charms of Michigan must figure into it somewhere.”

Gavin folds it all away in neat nests of tissue paper, gladder by far to pry into Nines than to have to look too closely at himself. That’s the bloodhound streak in Nines, the indefatigable tenacity to pursue his quarry wherever it leads him; an insistence that would read as stodgy on anyone else, but he’s built to walk into a bomb blast and come out the other side no worse for wear than the soot on his shirt. On him, it pierces through steel.

“So there you go,” says Gavin. “He’s a sentient fallout shelter and you can’t sneak an eBay transaction past him. No reason why he should need to take anything from me.”

Hank hauls himself upright, both palms on the table.

“Landau didn’t take anything from you, either,” he says. “You gave it to him.”

## 8.

He could make his way back to Fowler’s office; except that it feels oddly intrusive, the prospect of showing up where he knows he’s the subject under discussion. There’s something distastefully voyeuristic about it, _and not in the way that helps me pay my rent._ In lieu of anywhere else to be, Gavin drags a chair out from the conference room and parks himself next to the door, waiting for Nines.

For the second time that day, Tina descends upon him in benevolence. “Hey, catch,” she says from halfway down the corridor, a can of carbonated Thirium 310 in her hand. Then she sees his empty sleeve: “Never mind, no catching,” she says, and pops the pull tab open as she nears him.

“Thanks,” says Gavin and thinks, _I should have brought a jacket._

 _“Whatever you do,”_ says Tina, _“do it better with blue.”_

“Are you sponsored by Thiri-10?” he asks. Underneath his chilled palm, the drink fizzes against aluminum with a crisp hiss.

“That’s right, my entire existence is one long product placement,” she says, huddling down next to his chair. “What does it taste like? I’ve always wondered, but somehow I don’t think I should ingest it.”

“You probably could. All this commercially available stuff is so diluted, it may as well be water,” says Gavin. He tilts the can towards Tina, but she wrinkles her nose and shakes her head. “Or at least, it may as well be perfluorocarbons. Doesn’t taste like much.”

“It’s so heavy in the can,” she says.

“Yeah, mostly it just tastes _dense,”_ he says. “It’s nice to get something cold in you, though. I guess that’s— refreshing.” A brisk mouthful of it soothes him the whole way down, and he adds, “You don’t have to hang around just because Nines told you to. I’m sure you have shit to do.”

“All Nines asked me to do is bring you in from the lobby,” she says. “I got you the drink because I figured you’d want it.”

The next mouthful of Thiri-10 feels thicker than it should, goes down like a lump. “Still,” he says, “you should get Nines to reimburse you for it.”

“Speak of the six million dollar devil,” she says.

Nines strides out of the bullpen, a stack of dossiers in one hand, _Anthony “Boots” Butacavoli_ blazed in red across the top flap. Even the listless bureaucracy of Central Station can’t manage to blunt his edges entirely, this great white wolf padding across the carpeted floor.

“Oh, shit,” says Gavin. “It’s the Feds.”

“I heard about the arm,” says Nines. “That’s good news.”

“Who stole my lede?” demands Gavin. “Was it Connor? I bet it was Connor.” 

“Agent,” says Tina, unfolding herself, “Gavin thinks you should reimburse me for this drink I bought him.”

“If you want to do the paperwork for it,” says Nines, “you would be more than welcome to twelve dollars from the Bureau’s operating budget.”

“It’s fifteen here,” Tina yells over her shoulder as she goes. “These vending machines should be arrested for aggravated robbery.”

Gavin drains the last of the can. “You should slip her a twenty,” he tells Nines. “I can’t believe Connor told you about the arm thing, I was going to do that. What a snitch.”

Nines looks down at Gavin, sprawled in his commandeered office chair. _Maybe,_ thinks Gavin, _I’ll never know everything that whirs through this head of his,_ but he’s learning how to listen to all the quiet roundabout ways that Nines speaks to him. The weight behind his frigid eyes.

“What,” says Gavin, just to shake the silence loose.

“Hold this,” says Nines.

Gavin accepts the pile of dossiers that Nines thrusts at him, tucking them into the crook of his remaining elbow. Then, when Nines takes off his windbreaker and drops it onto Gavin’s shoulders — a vast sweep that settles over him, gentle as a blanket of snow in midwinter — Gavin bites down on the inside of his cheek, and he takes that too.

“We’ll get one that fits me better,” says Gavin, threading his arm into a sleeve, happy to swim in it.

“You’re not joining the FBI,” says Nines.

“I suppose that’s your opinion,” says Gavin.

Nines retrieves the dossiers from him and says, “Butacavoli is here.” Another long perusal of Gavin lost in the FBI jacket, the puddle of fabric at his midriff, his fingers picking at the drooping elastic cuffs. “But I can tell him to come back,” says Nines. “Some other time.”

“God, will you just— I want to talk to him,” says Gavin. “Wouldn’t it be nice if his own children wanted to talk to him half as badly as I do? How’s that for a burn? I think I’m ready.”

Anthony Butacavoli is no one of any importance. Even Boots himself, a fragile ego swaddled in layers of persecution complex bubble wrap, would be hard-pressed to disagree. He’s one of several dozen interchangeable lower rungs on the ladder of the Landau corporation; the only reason Gavin has more than passing familiarity with him is because Boots went through an extremely rough divorce, during which time he bummed around the compound like it was his local YMCA. Gavin, out to walk the Presas, would pass by a kitchen window and hear Boots spouting off paranoid theories about the parentage of his children.

Maybe it was the alimony payments closing in on him, but Boots got sloppy and Boots got nabbed. Out of the grab-bag of names that the agents’ visit to Frankie’s yielded, Boots was the only one immediately careless enough to leave a trail a mile long, a grimy handprint pointing his way every time he greased a palm down at the docks. His dossier filled to brimming.

There’s enough in it already to get him on bribery and extortion, but Boots isn’t who they’re after. If they can leverage that to turn him as an informant — which is where Gavin comes in, a persuasive voice to nudge him along the path of least resistance — that would give them an in as they work their way up the chain, as they try to bring the bigger picture of the post-Landau landscape into focus. Because — once again, just to be absolutely clear about it — Boots is no one of any importance at all.

“No offense,” says Gavin.

Boots, twitchy as a spooked chihuahua, stares at the _FBI_ lettering on the chest of Gavin’s jacket.

“I was wondering where you’d fucked off to,” he says. “Actually, no. I never wondered that. But I guess I got my answer.”

“Surprise,” says Gavin, and spreads his arms.

Boots follows the swing of the empty sleeve with his golf ball eyes. “FBI, huh,” he says.

“Great job, Boots,” says Gavin. “Those adult literacy classes are really working out for you.”

Nines likely didn’t give him the jacket to use it as a cover identity, nor did Gavin walk into the interrogation chamber intending to impersonate a federal agent, but he doesn’t see the harm in letting Boots fill in some of the gaps with his overactive imagination. At any rate, Nines is next door in the observation room; he can make the call to suspend the interview if anything offends his delicate white-collar sensibilities.

“So that’s who keeps you now?” asks Boots. “The Feds?”

“Don’t know what you mean,” says Gavin, “but that kind of sounds like hate speech.”

“It’s not about androids,” says Boots. “Just about you. I know what you were like around Desmond. Someone or other’s always got you on a leash, or you wouldn’t fucking know what to do with yourself.”

What’s so intolerably insulting is that even a shithead like _Boots_ has figured this out about him, in the scant amount of time they’ve spent in each other’s orbit. The assessment is too true to even sting, but god, to have it pointed out by this asshole. _Well, motherfucker,_ thinks Gavin, _you’ve gone and made it personal. I’m not leaving this room until I’ve flipped you like a silver dollar pancake._

“—Boots,” he says, tapping his finger on the fat stack of dossiers, “I gotta apologize to you. Maybe I haven’t expressed myself with the clarity that I should have.”

Suspicious, Boots’s mouth contorts underneath his moustache.

“I know you came in here all puffed up, like _I ain’t telling them nothing,_ really ready to take one for the team,” says Gavin. “Tragically, that’s not what you’re here for. We just wanted you to get some fresh air and see the sun before you spend the next twenty years in federal prison. The best part is, Boots, we don’t even need you to tell us anything for that to happen. I’m sorry to crush your dreams of heroism.”

“Fuck off,” says Boots. “Twenty? Best you got me for is bribery.”

“Is that right?” asks Gavin. “Here I was, thinking it was extortionate conduct involving interstate commerce. I must have brought in someone else’s file by mistake.”

He opens the dossier and spins it around. Clipped to the first page is a photograph of a second-floor union office window through a telephoto lens, Boots’s craggy features clearly visible between the angled slats of the venetian blinds.

“I was about to congratulate you on moving up in the world,” says Gavin. “Seems like just yesterday that you were scoping out condemned houses to sling ice in, and now they let you do all this? But I must have confused you for someone else.”

Boots looks down at the photo and ruminates on this. Then he hooks one elbow over the backrest of his chair, eyes narrowed, studying Gavin.

“I was wrong, too,” says Boots. “Feds don’t have you yet.”

“Are you still on about that,” asks Gavin.

“What you are,” says Boots, “is in between owners. Isn’t that right, Gavin? Someone hasn’t made their mind up about you.”

“Do you find the picture unflattering?” asks Gavin. “Is that why you’re upset?”

“It’s like when a lion sees an antelope with a broken leg,” says Boots. “Someone’s circling you and thinking, _maybe this could be mine._ You have that air, you know. Like you want to be claimed.”

The ceiling speaker crackles to life. “—Gavin,” says Nines’s voice, “you don’t need to—”

“Shut it, Nines,” says Gavin. “I got it.”

He looks towards the two-way mirror, blindly searching out where he thinks Nines might be, banking that at least a portion of his irritation translates to self-assurance on his face. When he turns back to the table, Boots raises his eyebrows.

“Is that him?” asks Boots.

Mercifully, before Gavin has to convince Boots to please focus on his own legal predicament — rather than idle away the time pretending to be the type of psychiatrist who would have several active sexual harassment lawsuits — the mounted television screen on the far wall starts to play an audio file.

“—we’re not planning on moving much.” A bit muffled by the cloud of room tone, but it’s Boots, unmistakeable. “Maybe fifty, a hundred keys. I’ll have numbers by the end of the week, once Vanny lets us know, but that’s what we’re looking at. Keep that in mind.”

“It’s just that,” says someone else’s voice, “late notices like these are highly irregular.”

“Highly irregular, is it?” asks Boots. “Highly irregular? I wonder what else is going to be _highly fucking irregular?_ When I—”

Gavin gestures, and the tape clicks silent. “More where that came from,” he says. “We have all the rest of it. You get very ugly near the end, some real vintage shows of intimidation there, powerful stuff.”

It is, after all of that, immensely gratifying to watch Boots drain ashen from the hairline down. He keeps staring at the screen with a numb incredulity, like he’s holding out hope that the recording might have been a particularly unfortunate hallucination. Twenty years may be an optimistic projection, but that’s nothing Boots needs to know.

“Don’t you wish you’d been just a little more professional?” asks Gavin. “This is why we don’t threaten the same people we negotiate with, and we definitely don’t do it in the same breath. Shouldn’t shit in the hand that feeds you, as they say. You really fucking bungled this one.”

“Fuck you,” says Boots, weakly.

“Yeah,” says Gavin, “but let’s talk about Vanny.”

That jumped out at him when he leafed through the transcript; Vance de Vries, as far as Gavin remembers, isn’t the caliber of criminal that would be comfortable at the top of a Landau-sized pyramid. The thought of Vanny ruling over this empire — _Vanny,_ who gets excited when the McRib is back — strikes Gavin as fundamentally risible.

Boots perks up a little at the mention of Vanny, which is almost heartbreaking. “Vanny will take care of this,” he says. “Happened to Trout. Cruiser pulled up when he still had the electrical cord in his hand, and nothing ever stuck to him.”

“Because Desmond was around,” says Gavin. “You think Vanny will do what Desmond did? Vanny won’t do shit for you, Boots. You know that. He’s stretched so thin that he promoted _you_ to handle the docks, and you think he has the resources to get you out of this one?”

“There’s still connections,” says Boots, “from when Desmond was around.”

“When idiots like you keep burning all the bridges you get your hands on? What a miracle, call the Vatican,” says Gavin. “And even if Vanny wants to do you a solid— can I level with you? I would be very fucking surprised if he’s allowed to make his own calls about that right now.”

The rug pulled out from under him, Boots falters. “Why?” he asks. “Vanny’s in charge of Detroit, isn’t he? Sounds like you know that much.”

 _Not before you went gabbing off on tape,_ thinks Gavin. “Give me a break, you’re only moving fifty keys and you still think Detroit means anything?” He pushes his chair back impatiently, metal legs caterwauling across the floor. “Fifty kilos? Since when is this a mom-and-pop red ice corner store? The action’s headed out of Detroit, you dumb fuck. Someone is systematically funneling raw Thirium out of the city, distributing product from some other base of operations,and you haven’t been told about it. Why is that? Because you’re fucking nobody, Boots, and they’ll let you rot while the rest of them — that’s Vanny included — pack up all their shit to go sit pretty somewhere else.”

Gavin shrugs his shoulders, _I don’t know what to tell you_ , hollow sleeve rippling as it falls back at his side.

“You didn’t get a promotion,” he says. “You got locked in the engine room of a ship they’re going to sink.”

Boots looks so crestfallen as he absorbs this information that Gavin nearly feels a twinge of sympathy; then he remembers the kind of shit Boots used to say about his imminent ex-wife, and all that pity instantly recoils into itself like a tape measure snapping free. 

“Still,” mutters Boots, “twenty years in lockup is twenty years alive. I flip, and the next thing I know, I’m the one with my head smashed in on my bedroom floor.”

“That’s what WITSEC is for,” says Gavin. “You like Santa Barbara, Boots? You like the beach?”

His forehead in his hands, thumbs digging circles into his temples, Boots huddles into the frame of his body and can’t find a way out for himself. His ex-wife gone, his children resentful. The barrel of a gun on the one hand, palm trees on the other. If, somehow, everything he’d fucked up could be clean forgotten.

Out of the side of his mouth, Boots says, “I don’t even know what you want me to do,” and it’s then that Gavin knows they have him. _And now,_ thinks Gavin, _who’s the antelope with the broken leg?_ His teeth in the jugular, ready for the coup de grace.

All of him a leaping flame, Gavin turns towards the two-way mirror again. He barely notices the room reflected in it, the catchpenny table and chairs, the barren walls, the fevered triumph in his own eyes, Boots in his attitude of malaise. Even when Gavin can’t see him— _I know you’re there on the other side, watching me._ Nines with his breath held tight in his lungs, his eyes on Gavin — only this panel of glass between them — as the tide turns and they scent the kill, _your pulse picks up to a drumming beat, same as mine._

_I’m the dagger in your pocket, your hawk on the wing. Look at what I could do for you._

Into the froth of their comm line, Gavin asks:

_good?_

Nines’s reply, so swift and forceful that it hums like a whip:

_always_

“I think they’re headed to the UP,” says Gavin, yanking the door closed behind him.

“That’s what I thought,” says Nines, from his perch in front of the mirror. Beyond it, back in the muted interrogation room, two other federal agents are walking Boots through the finer details of his tenure as informant.

“Militia land,” says Gavin. “That must be so exciting for them, it’s like finally meeting someone face-to-face after exchanging messages online for years. Ice distributors and private militia, two of the shittiest groups of people in the United States, consummating their abhorrent love at last.”

“How much of it is true, what you said about Vance de Vries?” asks Nines. “Him taking control of operations in Detroit— that’s a good indication that the whole outfit is skipping town?”

“Very likely,” says Gavin. “Vanny doesn’t have it in him. He’s not the type that Landau was.”

“And what type is that,” asks Nines.

Startled by the unexpected barb in the question, Gavin swivels from the mirror to stare at him; Nines, profile lit in the glow of the interrogation room, doesn’t even stir to acknowledge the reaction. Unnerving in his severity— but for the smallest tilt at the corner of his mouth, the trace of a smile. _He thinks things are funny._

Instantly unwound, Gavin returns to the mirror. He makes a mental note for himself: _the FBI, an adder’s den of shameless opportunists, is not above using ongoing criminal investigations as fodder for flirtation._ Admittedly, it doesn’t _not_ work. He supposes he should respond in kind.

“Like any half-decent drug baron,” says Gavin, “he was hung like a fucking horse. May his memory be a blessing.”

Nines appears satisfied with the dearth of sentiment in this exchange. “If Butacavoli can keep his head down and manage not to fly off the handle for a few months,” he says, “we should have a better sense of who’s behind the move upstate— when upstate, where upstate, that sort of thing. The details we need in order to salvage the racketeering case.”

He pauses, then corrects himself. “That _I_ need to salvage the case.” Another pause, then: “That _we_ need, but by _we_ I mean the _Bureau,_ not—”

“Too late,” says Gavin. “I’ll come into the office tomorrow.”

“You wouldn’t like it anyway,” says Nines. “Too many rules for your taste, I imagine.”

“That’s why you love working there, isn’t it?” asks Gavin. “All the red tape and paperwork, right up your alley. You look like a toner cartridge wouldn’t melt in your mouth.”

Boots says something inaudible and both the agents shake their heads sternly, in sync. This catapults Boots onto his feet and into a furious fit of pacing.

“A melting toner cartridge?” repeats Nines. “What does that even mean?”

“To tell you the truth,” says Gavin, “I’m not sure myself. But you felt like you were being insulted, which is what matters.”

“I suppose the regulations were what initially drew me to this line of work,” admits Nines. “Yes, I was manufactured with an FBI placement already in mind, but— it suited me, nonetheless. Especially after the deviancy firmware upgrade.”

“You liked the structure,” says Gavin.

“I didn’t know that at some point, the structure would become—” Nines watches as Boots grips the back of a chair with both hands like he’s about to throw it across the room, then sets it back in place, unable to muster up the mettle. “—Become an inhibition,” he continues. “Structure doesn’t just stop at establishing principles of engagement. It defines what’s possible to attempt.”

He rests his elbows on the ledge of the desk and leans forward, though there isn’t enough of substance going on in the interrogation room to merit that kind of concentration. In the chill of the overhead light, his browbone casts a shadow stark enough to cut.

“Clearance rates, for example,” he says. “It’s one thing for law enforcement to evaluate its own efficacy, but it’s another thing altogether when that dependence on clearance rates is what determines which cases remain open and which are ordered closed.” The set of his shoulders brittle, he adds: “When it is and isn’t permissible to chase the splinters of a crime syndicate up past the Straits of Mackinac.”

“But that’s the entire basis of Electric Slide,” says Gavin, as he sheds the windbreaker. “If that’s not permissible, then— they’re not thinking of shutting it down, are they? What, and just bury this whole thing you’ve been putting together for years now?”

“For as long as Electric Slide has existed,” says Nines, “there has been friction about what its ultimate objective should be. The Detroit Division SAC always wanted it to be a standalone drug trafficking case, aiming to dismantle the Landau enterprise; the case agent is of much the same opinion in that regard. I have— other investments.”

He takes the jacket when Gavin hands it to him, but says, “You can hold onto it until your arm gets here.”

“Too big,” says Gavin. “Feels like I’m walking around in a tarp. Connor said you came to Detroit because of the Statehouse Bombing, as counterterrorism? So you’re after the right-wing militias, not the drugs. You were using Landau as a stepping stone to get to the militia purse strings.”

“Unfortunately, the task of uprooting paramilitary extremists by starving them of funds has no clear timetable or grand finale,” says Nines. “It’s all a bit too nebulous for the SAC’s tastes. A RICO case that culminates in a dozen suspects being frog-marched past the network news crews, while the Director stands behind a podium and says something inspiring about the Bureau’s commitment to cleaner streets— that’s the kind of optics they’re looking for. What I have in mind won’t give them that. I don’t _want_ to give them that.”

“You wouldn’t have to deal with the brass so much if you were at the office less,” says Gavin. “Didn’t you deflect a pipe bomb blast? The crowning glory of CyberLife’s R&D billions, and you sit in front of a desk and make phone calls all day. Like any other android equipped with less tensile strength would be incapable of filling out requisition forms.”

Nines puts the jacket back on, one sleeve at a time. Underneath his shirt, the terrain of his back shifts like a starling flock in motion, a murmuration of sinew. _All that,_ thinks Gavin, _and you keep it to yourself._

“It would be convenient,” says Nines, “if I could offer you a fully rational explanation for my request to be transferred into a more administrative role.”

“You asked for this?” Gavin frowns, nonplussed. “I suppose no one enjoys having a bomb go off in their face, but— then again, what do I know, a bomb wouldn’t have left enough of me to garnish an industrial waste heap. So I guess I’d have asked for a desk job too, after something like that.”

“If it had been a threat to bodily integrity that compelled me, I would consider that a more or less rational explanation,” says Nines. “But I knew I wasn’t in danger of harm. I wasn’t— fearful. Not of damage.” His eyes are fixed on the feeble spectacle of Boots kicking up a fuss about something, but he’s clearly not paying it any mind. “I think,” says Nines, “in some way— knowing I could withstand much more than that was what I found so disconcerting. The prospect that I could be capable of nearly anything.”

Once — only seconds before the end — Gavin looked down the length of a Bureau-issue Glock and remembered his insides wreathing the floor, tumbling out of him like a gutted fish. That paralyzing synopsis of his own helplessness, the knowledge that he was at the mercy of everyone who’d had a hand in shaping him, each with their private designs for what he was meant to do _—_ Nines must have felt much the same thing, on his feet in the wreckage of a blown-out trailer home. As the scrap metal littered the lot around him and the ashes danced into his hair, spattered in the meager remains of a domestic terrorist, Nines looked down at his hands and thought, _I don’t know what comes next._

“Parameters,” says Gavin. “You don’t like constantly butting heads with your case agent, but that’s a kind of roadmap, just the same. Otherwise — on the ground — there’s no signs to tell you what turns to make. Shit, what if you think you’re going the right way, but you end up in Ohio instead?”

“Yes, something like that,” says Nines. “Parameters.”

 _Parameters that govern behavior._ The last time Gavin heard Nines say it, he was busy fingering himself open as Nines drank him down, chin in one hand. Suddenly hot under his collar, Gavin steers the subject back to shallow waters.

“It’s still a ridiculous name,” he says. “Operation Electric Slide.”

“Lucky for you that you don’t need to worry about it,” says Nines.

“I would very much like to worry about it,” says Gavin. “I don’t know if you heard, but someone smashed in Landau’s skull with a GV500 arm. Okay, I know that’s DPD business, but there’s no way that the murder is unrelated to whatever’s happening with the organization now, right? If I’m being dragged into a case, I reserve the right to be indignant about what it’s called.”

On the other side of the mirror, the Anthony Butacavoli variety hour seems to draw to a close. The agents stand to usher Boots out the door; the second to depart looks towards the observation room and gestures at the ceiling, so Nines turns off the lights in the interrogation chamber as Gavin switches on theirs.

The contrast isn’t as severe as going from unlit to the daytime sun, and it only takes Gavin a moment or two of deliberate blinking to catch up. Nines waits until his levels balance out, then says, “Strange way of trying to frame you, though.”

“What’s that?” asks Gavin.

“The knuckle pattern injury isn’t what I would call irrefutable evidence,” says Nines. “Pulling the access log takes time, and getting the geolocation data from CyberLife would have been a protracted legal battle, but the only real obstacle that either poses is the hassle involved. There was never any possibility that you could be charged for this, precisely because there’s too much stored information that specifically exonerates you.”

“Would the general public know how all of that works?” asks Gavin.

“Maybe not _how,_ but certainly _that_ it works,” says Nines. “That there are systems in place for authenticating android movement. Even if I didn’t know much about it, I would certainly conduct some research into it before relying on its absence as a way to pin a murder on someone.”

He looks sidelong at Gavin and adds: “That is, _if I did it_ — unless you’re still trying not to bring up O.J. Simpson.”

Gavin lets out a strangled laugh. “Are you serious?” he asks. “I thought you were going to pretend we— _O.J._ is how you’re doing it? We can’t discuss it without getting there by way of O.J. fucking Simpson?”

“I wasn’t aware that there was much to discuss,” says Nines, archly. “Do you typically debrief after a private show?”

“You know when the debriefing typically happens,” says Gavin. “You watched me do it.”

There’s a smart knock on the door. “Arm delivery,” says Connor’s voice.

“—Come in,” says Nines.

The door cracks open; a sliver of Connor’s face peeks in through the gap. “Am I interrupting?” he asks.

“What are you doing?” demands Gavin. “Open the door the rest of the way, Jesus.”

Connor steps through, carrying the evidence bag before him like an offering of peace. Detached from anything to give it scale, the arm seems grotesquely elongated in its plastic wrapper, so unwieldy that it’s a wonder it can do anything at all.

“Doesn’t it look like a ham hock?” Gavin asks Nines.

“I’d be concerned about that ham,” says Nines. “All clear?”

“All clear,” says Connor. “We’re sending out the log to be independently verified— but I went over it, and everything looks the way it should. You’re good to go, Gavin. Thanks for the assistance.”

“No problem,” says Gavin, ceremoniously receiving the arm as Connor hands it over. “The best part of waking up is cooperating with law enforcement. I’ve always said that.”

He holds his arm up by the elbow joint and swings it back and forth, making it wave to Connor as he leaves. The bag crinkles so loudly that it drowns out the sound of the door latch springing back into its slot. Nines, still seated in front of the mirror, pulls out the chair next to his.

“What I wanted to do was flip him off with it,” says Gavin, passing him the evidence bag and settling in, “but I probably need to be attached to it for fine motor skills like that.”

Nines is quiet as Gavin tugs the hem of his shirt up over himself. Ragtag in front of him again, Gavin tenses up under the feeling of Nines’s hands on him, the careful search of lining up the pins in his rotator cuff. Downcast in concentration, the dark fan of Nines’s eyelashes, close enough to brush.

“You know,” says Gavin, his mouth dry, “Hank and Connor tried to turn me against you, earlier. Said I should watch out for you getting what you want out of me.”

It’s meant to be a shared joke between them; he expects Nines to respond with disdain, some imperious rejoinder about Hank and Connor’s provincial apprehension. Instead, Nines runs his thumb over the edge of Gavin’s scapula plate and says nothing, the silence fraught.

“Well,” he says, after what seems like an unbearable eternity, “they’re not wrong.”

Gavin’s objection shoots to the tip of his tongue — _of course they’re wrong, you’re not like that_ — but some minute tactile feedback from the arm lets Nines know he has the alignment he’s been looking for. His free hand comes to rest at Gavin’s collarbone, fingertips pressing into his skin just past the neckline of his undershirt. When he snaps the arm back into place, palm against Gavin’s chest for leverage, the skin between them strains and peels back for a fleeting instant— and something wild surges in past the barriers, knocking the air from Gavin.

He flinches back, scalded. The color winds around the contours of his arm again, flesh growing over his bones.

“—Sorry,” says Nines, helter-skelter, “I—”

“No, you didn’t mean— it’s okay,” says Gavin, diving headfirst into his own shirt. He momentarily considers the merits of remaining there for a few minutes, at least until his ears stop burning, before he threads both arms through the sleeves and reluctantly surfaces.

Nines, LED a raucous red, clears his throat.

“Do you need to calibrate?” he asks.

“I think everything’s in order,” says Gavin.

His heads-up display appears largely unconcerned, just a placid observation of _right arm: connected_ that slides out of view before long. He splays out all five fingers on his right hand, then curls them into a fist. Rotates his wrist, experimentally rolls his shoulder back; and slowly, deliberately, he flips Nines off.

“Would you look at that,” says Gavin. “Good as new.”

Shaking his head, Nines turns towards the mirror, though there’s nothing to see on the other side except an empty room with its lights turned off. The glow of his LED flares cherry-hot, staining the glass.

 _In spite of everything,_ thinks Gavin, _I think you must want me around._

## 9.

_—nowhere to be._

Gavin jerks awake with a start, nearly tearing himself out of the wall-mounted dock. At the base of his skull, the charging cable strains as he turns his head; he reaches up and yanks it free, skin surging back over the port, the pump in his chest slowing its breakneck churn.

He sinks onto the edge of his bed. In the press kit announcing the release of the GV500 model line, the subheading: _Round-the-Clock Security for Your Peace of Mind._ Only half of him enters standby mode during stasis, leaving the other half alert to perceive and react to environmental stimuli. _Unihemispheric slow-wave sleep,_ said the pamphlet, next to a stock picture of a dolphin with its teeth bared.

So it’s not a dream, exactly, what shakes him out of sleep. None of the merciful distance of metaphor that makes a dream bearable, or interesting, at the very least. Half of him must have registered something nearby that reminded him of—

Outside his window, a construction vehicle parked at the end of the block swivels its amber beacon. His field of vision steeps warm as the light floods into his bedroom, then to shadows as it ebbs, golden once more when it pirouettes back. _That’s what it was,_ thinks Gavin. _The streetlights on the highway._

The autocab was waiting at the back door of the lounge when they stepped out. Some asshole was plastered to its side, wrestling mightily with the locked handle as his date wobbled nearby on her heels, both of them shitfaced.

 _Not your car,_ said Gavin. _Fuck off._

He authenticated the ride and held the rear passenger door open, the couple skittering away towards main street. Stepping into the car, Landau raised an eyebrow at him in ersatz admonishment.

 _Be nice to the civilians, Gavin,_ he said.

 _Sorry,_ said Gavin, when he’d flung himself onto the backseat from the other side. _Long day at work._

He loosened the knot of his tie with a baleful tug, unbuttoned the throat of his shirt while he was at it, clumsy and impatient with trimmings. Landau laughed as he cracked a window open, rummaging inside his jacket for a smoke.

 _Not your thing, I take it,_ he said. _But I couldn’t get you into the room, otherwise._

 _It must have been what everyone else in there did,_ said Gavin. _Dressed their muscle up in silks to pretend like they didn’t come prepared for a fucking massacre._

 _Turned out to be a quiet night,_ said Landau. _No one even raised their voice._

 _Probably because everyone knew that everyone else was strapped,_ said Gavin.

 _And that’s the secret of how we get things done,_ said Landau, around the cigarette in his mouth.

Gavin reached over to light it. The rigid ceremony of a backroom talk like this took more out of him, bled him dry in ways that straightforward protection detail didn’t. It was always harder to adequately gauge a threat when every last person in the room was a jittery uncomfortable mess; a whole bouquet of short fuses, tinder in the vase.

 _Though not as much got done as they would have liked,_ said Gavin. _Thanks to you._

 _They don’t know what they’re talking about._ Landau waved off the concern, dismissive. _Can’t see out of their own fucking asses on a clear day. That’s called being short-sighted, Gavin. They can’t wrap their minds around what’s coming._

 _What’s coming?_ asked Gavin.

 _Say we expand like they want to,_ said Landau. _We take the business out of Detroit— and then what? Sure, right now the U.S. government is panning for Thirium like it’s the Gold Rush in the Arctic, but that’s not for long. Total chemical synthesis isn’t far off on the horizon. Panning’s meant to throw Russia off the scent, but behind closed doors, they’re busy with high-stakes alchemy. Russia’s doing the exact same thing, I guarantee it. And once that’s achieved— that’s the end of the profit margin for red ice._

He took a long vexed drag, displeased by the myopia of his peers. _Dirt-cheap ice,_ he said, _same quality as anything mined, but at a fraction of the cost. That’ll saturate the supply until it’s cheaper to burn it than to move it. The market will take decades to recover, if it ever does, and I sure as hell don’t plan on sticking around that long._

 _You’ll do what?_ asked Gavin. _Retire?_

 _So to speak,_ said Landau. _I’ll take a deal, do a few years, move somewhere warm on the DOJ’s dime._

 _Take a deal?_ Gavin straightened up in surprise, twisting in his seat to stare at Landau. _You mean— snitch?_

 _Let’s not be crass,_ said Landau. _It's only snitching when the rank-and-file do it. Where I am, it’s called turning state’s evidence._ He ashed the cigarette out the window and went on: _Besides, Gavin, you’ve been here long enough to know what shitbags I’d be testifying against. You can’t believe that any loyalty comes into it, other than the kind that goes to the highest bidder._

Gavin had, indeed, been there long enough to know. _Yeah,_ he said.

 _I’m extending them as much courtesy as they’d extend to me. Worthless, the lot of them,_ said Landau. Then he turned towards Gavin and smiled, immeasurably affectionate. _Present company excluded, of course._

Outside the cab, the highway lights darted past them like shooting stars. _You know,_ said Landau, _I worry about what will happen to you,_ as he absently took Gavin’s wrist in hand, fussing with the set of his cufflinks.

 _Why?_ asked Gavin. _I have everything I need._

 _When an Egyptian pharaoh died,_ said Landau, _they buried his things with him. His best horses. His favorite wives, his closest advisors. His most prized possessions. I think that whatever happens to me, if anything happens to me, that will probably be it for you._

 _Who’s assigned to bury me?_ asked Gavin, eyes on his wrist.

 _No one’s burying you,_ scoffed Landau. _Don’t take it so literally. What I’m saying is that without me, you’d have nowhere to go._

Gavin had been there long enough to know this, too.

 _Nowhere to be,_ said Landau.

The blow catches him just above the eye, taking a ragged tear of skin along with it. A bright spray of blood that lingers in the air, fresh and delicate as a sheaf of baby’s-breath. _Nowhere to go._ One strike after another, battering him raw until the flesh hangs free, unearthing a curve of bone that gleams like porcelain, like a machine chassis, a moonlight sheen. With each impact that caves his skull in, _nowhere to be,_ the crown of his head sundering apart _._ Landau, half his face torn into rags, smiles at him and fixes his cuffs for him. _Gavin, you have nowhere to be._

 _—Son of a bitch,_ thinks Gavin, and sags to one side until he’s curled on the lip of his mattress. _Why am I thinking about you?_

He checks the time; in the corner of his display, a neat little stamp, _4:07 AM._ His battery, holding at 82%. The amber eye of the construction vehicle goes on swerving outside in its lighthouse arcs, and despite the inopportune hour, it seems to Gavin like his night is done for good.

 _Might as well take my mind off it, then._ The nighthawks online at four in the morning aren’t his usual crowd, but there’s enough of them trawling around to fill out a room. Their tokens clink just the same. With his curtains drawn against the beacon light and his camera winking back at him, he’s on firmer ground.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he says to the chat, twirling the plug between his fingers as he holds it up. “Thought maybe you could lend a hand and tire me out.”

Fifteen minutes, half an hour, tops. He’s not even angling for a private session. Just a quick tip-to-vibe show; he’ll spend some time making conversation, preening for the crowd, then — when he feels a little more like himself again — get himself off, wash himself down, and start the day in earnest like an upstanding citizen. It’s something to do in the meanwhile.

His audience understands the rules of engagement. The tips are meant to tease, a token here and there, five tokens, adding up to quick vibrations that keep him just warm enough to sustain the mood. Another five seconds paid for, _you look good with that tight ass plugged up,_ and Gavin exhales breathily as the low hum runs through him.

Some curious newcomer, presumably drawn there by the _this is an interactive room_ banner on the landing page, asks: _Did they make you that stacked or did you do that for yourself_

“Autobiographical disclosure is a thousand tokens apiece,” says Gavin. “But so’s a minute and a half of making me feel good. You wanna watch me come or listen to me read from my memoir?”

 _Okay, some teeth,_ types the newcomer, _I see what you’re about,_ and stays.

“Or come see me again some other time,” says Gavin. “Who knows, maybe I’ll slip up.”

It’s early, and the viewers are still trickling in; he’s less concerned about looking out for regulars, uncustomary as the hour is, so he misses the heads-up from the participant list. The only warning he has is a sharp whistle and the deceptively anodyne notification in the chat:

_RICO31787 tipped 300 tokens_

“—Wait,” says Gavin, “sh—”

Thirty straight seconds at maximum intensity, before he can ready himself for it. Gavin gasps out loud, the sudden shock of pleasure dragging him underwater, his bed linens pulling taut as he twists his fingers in the sheets. Thirty seconds of sweet torture, airless with surprise, the heat pooling deep in his hipbones.

“Ah, _god,_ motherfucker,” he groans as it tapers off, his thighs still trembling in the aftermath. “That’s—”

_RICO31787 tipped 300 tokens_

“—Come _on,”_ he manages to get out, just as the plug lurches back to life. _I’m going to write an anonymous letter to his SAC,_ he thinks, dazedly. _There’s no way they’ve authorized him to do this,_ though the tail end of the thought smudges into a blur as the plug goes on purring inside him.

It’s not the kind that’s big enough to hit him where he’d like — only meant to keep an easy simmer going — and he’s caught between the _good_ and the _not good enough,_ clenching around the flared base as he does his best to ride it out, unraveled and needy for more. He can feel his walls start to twitch in anticipation, desperate little noises torn from him— then, just as abruptly as it began, the buzzing stops.

Half relieved, half bereft, Gavin glares at his camera. “I’m going to make a phone call,” he pants, boneless in the cushions.

The chat is, understandably, confused. _Right now?_ someone asks. _I think it’s a thing,_ someone else informs them, _calling someone while you’re getting fucked._ The most haplessly confused of the whole lot says, _got it,_ and then, _am I into that?_

“Need to have a word with Rico over here, throwing his money around,” says Gavin. “I get if you don’t like that, you’re free to head out. It’s a public room.”

 _Oh you know each other?_ the chat asks. _Rico a regular?_ The same confused person says, _I’m going to stick around until I figure out if I’m into this,_ which is honestly a laudable attitude to have.

Gavin rolls onto his stomach, legs a messy sprawl. RICO31787 tips again just as the call connects — a more manageable ten seconds, medium intensity — so there’s only a slight hitch in Gavin’s voice as he says, “You’re going to get yourself fired.”

“Imagine the egg on their faces,” says Nines’s voice, clear and close in Gavin’s head. “Building me, then sacking me.”

“Even aside from your job,” says Gavin, “I’m personally ambivalent about the prospect of the U.S. government giving me an orgasm.”

“As it happens,” says Nines, “today is out of pocket. The Bureau has nothing to do with it.”

“Just you, then,” says Gavin.

“I suppose so,” says Nines.

 _Just you._ Someone — maybe Nines, maybe some other zealous client — sets the vibe off again, hard. Gavin bucks up with a muffled curse, grinding his cock into the bed. _God, no,_ he thinks, _I would rather get shut down for the third time than come rutting against my mattress like some amateur,_ and lifts his hips up, weight on his elbows.

When he turns around to check, the chat seems pleased. _Nice view, hold that ass out._ It’s odd that the room isn’t emptying like he expected it might, but he’s got other fish to fry, anyway.

“Why do you keep showing up here,” he asks Nines.

“Should I stop?” asks Nines.

“You know that’s not the same question,” says Gavin. The stirring of the plug picks up again, and he drops his head to his hands, shivering, back arching into the sensation. “Can’t, ah— can’t ever give me a straight answer.”

“It’s not very interesting,” says Nines.

“I don’t want interesting,” says Gavin, teeth set. “I— I just want,” _just you,_ “just want what your answer is. _You’re_ not interesting.”

There’s a barely audible rustle over the line. It takes Gavin a second to realize that it’s the sound of Nines _laughing,_ low and quiet. Instantly — like a flock of birds startled into flight — Gavin’s pulse hurtles sky-high, a thousand pounding wings. He squeezes his eyes closed and balls his hands into fists, trying to focus instead on the press of his knuckles into his forehead.

“Same as everyone else here,” says Nines. “I came to watch you.”

It’s an answer and not an answer at all, at once. Like the thrum of the plug in him, so close to bullseye that it leaves Gavin burning with thirst, aching to be met. The tips have been relentless since he turned around, whoever is responsible for them, the unremitting quiver of silicone petting those first few inches inside him. Perhaps not the explosive release he craves — that he knows he can have, touched a little deeper inside — but he’s sensitive there just the same, and it’s more than enough to get him leaking hard.

“What about you?” asks Nines. “Are you getting what you came for?”

“Yeah, it’s— it’s good,” gasps Gavin, half to himself. “But it’s, _ah,_ I can’t— come like this, I need— need more.”

“You don’t have to ask for it,” Nines tells him. “You can do whatever you want.”

Distantly, like a playback of someone else’s body, Gavin watches his own hand reach down between his legs. _Whatever I want._ He spreads his knees further apart, letting the camera in on every last bit of it, and wraps his fingers around the heft of his full cock. It’s such a welcome wash of pleasure that he whines at the contact, open-mouthed, rubbing his cheek against the sheets. The tokens jingle into his tip jar, a molten stream.

“Ah, fuck—,” he grits out, clawing at his pillow.

“Better?” asks Nines.

“Better,” slurs Gavin, “yeah,” swiping the pad of his thumb over his slick cockhead. The length of his shaft peeks ruddy between his fingers as he strokes himself, shuddering when a brush sends the fizzle of something electric running down his spine. He ghosts a touch around the underside of his glans, light but precise, and the jolt makes him tighten deliciously around the hum of the plug.

Dizzy with the high, he barely knows what he’s saying aloud. Just the feeling of his own hand moving on his cock, exactly the way he likes it, as the fervid hunger of strangers lights him up from the inside. _And you,_ he thinks, _among the strangers, you._ Nines on the other end of the call, like a secret pressed to Gavin’s chest. Undressed and on display, his ass in the air, a little piece of him for sale to anyone with a couple dollars to blow— and still, _no one else has your voice in their head._ Incomparably precious, this small and private thing.

“I—” says Gavin, “I’m almost— _ah,_ if—”

“Yes,” Nines prompts him.

Precome beads at the crown of Gavin’s flushed cock, drips slowly onto the sheets, a viscous strand. He just needs the slightest nudge to tilt him over the edge, something to cling to as he falls.

“Can I,” he pants, “can I— say your name,” the sweat in his eyelashes blurring the room.

Nines, when he answers, sounds a little strangled. “If you like,” he says.

But Gavin finds, to his chagrin, that he doesn’t want to say it after all. Not in the way he meant to, extravagant and lush, something to flaunt for the nameless crowd. _I want them to look,_ thinks Gavin, _but I want them to know this isn’t theirs. Where you take me, that’s between us._

Instead, as the urgency of climax mounts in his bones, Gavin forces himself to swallow the noises slipping from him. Like shielding a candle from the wind, he tends to the bloom in the pit of his stomach, taming it, turning its face inland. And finally — when his blood is a hurricane through his veins, his whole body tensing on the brink — into the quiet eye of the storm, he offers it up.

“—Nines,” he whispers, just a shatter of a prayer.

The sound of Nines breathing in, sharp as broken glass. Gavin bites down on his lip and shakes apart, keening hot into the crumpled sheets. A streak of come spatters onto the bed between his knees, welling thick between his fingers in spurts as he brings himself off, the plug buzzing against the tender twitch of his hole and dragging out the moment interminably until he thinks he might have to scream.

“Stop,” he says, scratchy. “God, stop.” He flounders about in his app library and disconnects the plug from the chat, tugging it out of himself when he manages to get a grip on it. Winded, he collapses onto his stomach, mashing his wet cock underneath himself. The heat whirlpools in his chest, doesn’t let go of him easy.

In the chat, the confused spectator seems to have figured it out. _Turns out I’m into it_ , they type.

 _Yeah I couldn’t piece together what that phone convo was about? But I got invested,_ someone else says. _Really hot._ Another sums it up: _Came for the tits, stayed for the drama_

In retrospect, that last verdict is about what Gavin should have expected from the clientele that frequents this website. The respectable haul in his tip jar, too, is a testament to the approbation of the audience. “All right, show’s over,” he mumbles, fishing numbly in his bedside drawer for the remote to the webcam. “If you liked what you saw, come find me at my usual time, twice a week. Thanks for the tips, hope you got your fucking rocks off too.”

Because he is still in the service industry, caustic as his work persona might be, he flashes a quick untidy smile over his shoulder before he switches off the camera and lets the remote drop. He’d do more of a wind-down otherwise, but these aren’t his regulars, and besides— Nines is still on the line.

“Hey,” says Gavin, face buried in a cushion.

“I may have missed the appropriate moment to hang up,” says Nines. “But I did remember that I have a video to send you. Check your texts.”

Before Gavin can take a crack at him — _Is it your audition tape? I genuinely do think you’d be terrible at this job —_ the attachment comes through and the bristles crumble to dust in his throat. _Queenie,_ someone says from offscreen, _Rob._ The video pans down to the playroom floor of the shelter, where Queenie and Rob are lying puddled on top of each other, her head resting on his.

 _Say hello to Gavin,_ the voice tells them. Queenie and Rob look up towards the camera, brows drooping quizzically; maybe their ears prick up at the sound of his name, or maybe Gavin imagines it.

Landau in his study, the afternoon light through the French windows. _They missed you._ Gavin remembers the weight of the Presas as they settled next to him, restful against his leg, Landau’s hand in his hair as he thought: _This is where I belong._ Wasn’t that a kind of intimacy? A small and private thing, just for himself, gentle as Nines’s hands pressing his arm back into place.

_Haven’t I been here before?_

“It seems like they’re doing okay,” says Gavin, rote, like mouthing the words to a song he knows by heart.

“What?” asks Nines. He sounds personally affronted by Gavin’s response. “Yes, they’re being taken care of, but— you should go visit them sometime.”

“They got taken to Ann Arbor,” stammers Gavin, wrenched away from the blueprints by Nines’s indignation. “That’s 40 miles away, I can’t—”

“An immaterial consideration,” says Nines. “Would you like to hear about the fuel efficiency of the 2036 Chevy Malibu?”

“—You freak,” says Gavin. “You and that fucking car.”

He shifts and smears the damp patch he’s left on the bed, tacky against his ribcage. Should have laid something down, but of course, this wasn’t how it was supposed to go. It rarely ever is, with Nines.

“I have to wash these sheets,” says Gavin.

“Sorry if things got— out of hand,” says Nines.

“No,” says Gavin, “it’s exactly what I wanted,” because Nines has never taken anything from him that he wasn’t already eager to give.

 _Landau didn’t take anything from you, either,_ said Hank. _You gave it to him._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter is the final one, coming in about 2 to 3 weeks! Then just the coda left to go (which I have, ONCE AGAIN, forgotten to include as part of the chapter count until this very moment). Stick around to watch Gavin and Nines snatch a happy ending from the JAWS OF ENDLESS HANG-UPS


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